by Helen Garner
In the transit lounge at Dubai airport I share a café table with a bricklayer from Frankston: a small, tough, shyly smiling bloke of fifty or so, capable-looking and fit, with weather-beaten skin and faded, old-fashioned tatts. His thick grey hair is cut short and he has a husky, smoker’s voice. There is something pained in his face, an openness. He’s on his way to Edinburgh, he says, and from there up to the Shetland Islands: ‘My wife came from there.’
‘Came?’
‘Yeah. She…passed away. I don’t like to say it.’
‘That’s hard.’
‘We had a very happy marriage. That’s why I’m taking the trip.’
‘How come you didn’t do it together?’
‘We bought a holiday house to renovate, and it took up all our time and money. Then she got sick. So I’m going on my own, before whatever else happens.’
We take a walk around the huge bare terminal. In the carpeted aisles men are sound asleep on the floor, in rows, some on mats, some with shirts or scarves drawn over their mouths and noses. Half-a-dozen young men in starched white robes stroll about together. Their bearded faces have an otherworldly, purified look, their eyes are unfocused. One has a length of fine white cloth tossed casually over his head and shoulders. Perhaps they’re coming home from Mecca. Every hour or so, during our long wait, a man’s soft voice on the PA recites a prayer, or perhaps a blessing. Neither of us remarks on it, but my sad tradie, too, in his pure white T-shirt, is on a pilgrimage.
The old American woman sitting next to me on the plane watches me tear an article out of a Times Literary Supplement. ‘Are you a writer?’
‘How can you tell?’
‘I’m a psychologist.’
A caller on talkback radio says he was on the side of the striking teachers until they announced that they wouldn’t write comments on the children’s reports. ‘That was it,’ he barks. ‘The minute it started to affect me, I was against them.’ For a moment even the mouthy radio host is struck dumb.
The Trotskyist at the health resort, a pretty woman in her sixties with a cloud of curls, sat forward on the low couch after dinner, elbows across her thighs, and blazed on, unstoppable, about international politics. Her eyes seemed to move closer together and sink deeper into her skull; her lips twitched. She didn’t want to hear what we thought. She knew everything. She had read ‘thousands of books’. When someone she had interrupted registered a mild protest, she flared up: ‘I only started talking about the Middle East because I was asked questions!’ She contained the truth: she was a vessel filled to the brim with it; the lightest touch or tilt and out it poured—to her a precious nectar, to others a choking flood that drowned whatever frail proposition anyone else came up with.
A massage, by a silent young woman with long dark hair in a ponytail and large thoughtful eyes. Towards the end of the hour, while she worked on my right hand, I had a strange vision: that she was not touching me, but standing near me and transferring great armfuls of hydrangea-like flowers from one flat surface to another.
‘She’s one of those women,’ says my friend, ‘who put on perfume by spraying a cloud and walking into it.’
Three scorchers in a row. I went to pick up the boys from school. The sky was clouding over and the air was irritable. I waited at a table in the breezeway. Suddenly, above the asphalt of the big playground came a mighty rushing, counterclockwise, as if the air were being stirred by a spoon in a huge bowl. A blast of dirt hit me side-on. I sprang to my feet and ran to shelter in a stairwell. Grit poured past, heading north. The temperature plummeted and a superb, refreshing cool exploded all around. Raindrops struck the asphalt, stopped, then began in earnest. A teacher ran past. ‘I think it’s great!’ she cried, as if someone had complained. She let out a yell: ‘Waaa hoooo!’ The bell rang, and hundreds of kids burst out on to the playground, shouting, running, veering wildly and shrieking with laughter, arms extended, bags thumping on their backs. ‘The change! The change! The cool change is here!’
The nurse took the needle out of my arm and carried away a big flat dark red bag of my blood. I went to a table in the recovery area and prepared to read Woman’s Day for the regulation fifteen minutes, but soon I broke out in a sweat. My eyes weren’t working. Everything was going dotted and speckled. Oh God. I would have to draw attention to myself. I cried out feebly to the world at large, ‘Help! I’m going to faint!’ Two nurses ran from the other end of the room and grabbed me by the shoulders: ‘On to the floor. Get on to the floor.’ They laid me out on the lino tiles and fanned me with magazines. They kept asking if I felt better. ‘No. Gonna be sick.’ One of them put to my mouth a soft little plastic container shaped like a windsock. ‘Turn on your side.’ I obeyed. Nothing came up, just empty spasms. Loud pop music was playing, songs from the ’70s and ’80s. Faces came and went above my head, looking down at me without curiosity. The nurses flattened out a padded chair and got me on to it with my head lower than my heart. Water, salty pretzels, rest. In twenty minutes they gave me a cab voucher and someone walked me down the stairs to the Bourke Street cab rank. The driver scowled over his shoulder when I told him my inner-suburban destination: he rudely made it clear that it was not far enough. I bit his head off and told him to get going. A woman who has just sprawled retching on the floor of the Blood Bank is not to be trifled with.
‘Get crossways of me, LaBoeuf, and you will think a thousand of brick has fell on you.’
Charles Portis, True Grit
At an Australian literature conference in Armidale a dozen of us were taken by bus to visit the birthplace of the poet Judith Wright. In a homestead of deep, flowery verandas we were welcomed by female relatives with the long legs and quiet authority of horsewomen, not to mention the ability to knock up an airy sponge cake. While we were standing in the bedroom in which the poet had first seen the light of day, one of the academics murmured, ‘I once went into the room where Thomas Hardy was born. They didn’t think he’d survive. They threw him into a corner.’
She walks in my front door at dinnertime. I’ve made up the bed and turned on the lamps in her room, put some nasturtiums in a glass, laid out clean towels. Everything is pleasant and welcoming, but she doesn’t seem to notice. In the kitchen, where the air is perfumed by the soup I’ve got warming on the stove, I make the mistake of saying, ‘You’ve got a choice. Chicken and leek soup here, or turkey next door.’ Her tired face lights up: ‘Turkey?’ I suppose my kitchen bench does look a bit spartan, with its one small handful of broccoli on the chopping board.
After the public interview a woman came up to me and said without preliminary, in an accusing tone, ‘You were nervous.’
H: (surprised) ‘No, I wasn’t nervous.’
Woman: ‘You were nervous.’
H: ‘I always twitch and jump around in my seat, if that’s what you mean.’
Woman: (irritably) ‘I didn’t mean that. You—were—nervous.’
Luckily someone came up and interrupted us before I was obliged to punch her lights out.
One wigged and robed barrister to another, barging along William Street: ‘And as for this sleazebag fuckin’ spinmeister I work for—’
A middle-sized bird fell from the sky into our backyard. It was still alive when the boys found it, but one of the chickens, which had recently sprouted shiny purple tail feathers and was on death row, rushed at it and began to maul it. ‘Its back was broken,’ Ambrose told me, the tears still drying on his cheeks. ‘And David got the spade, and he hit it and hit it and hit it, and it went Er, er, er, er, er, er, and then it was dead.’ He wanted to write an epitaph. I gave him pencil and paper and he toiled over a draft: ‘This is a bird who went into our rooster’s territory. With a broken back, the rooster attacked it and then my dad took out his shovel and whacked it to death.’ Rather than correct his misattached modifier, I suggested we edit it down to a single sentence. He printed it with thick red texta on a piece of board: ‘Here lies a young bird.’ We pounded the stake into the grave, and away he
ran, singing.
‘I’d love it,’ says the tired wife to the husband, ‘if you made me a really nice little martini.’ He goes out to the kitchen. We hear the sharp metallic rattle of the shaker. Soon he returns bearing an expert little creation in a dainty glass. He hands it to her in a forward-leaning posture of gentle formality, and she accepts it with a smile. The quality of enchanted light that a martini emits in a lamplit room: icy, misty, strangely and coldly white—she might have been receiving a star, or an atomic particle, and raising it to her lips.
The young colourist, silken-haired and soft-voiced, started plastering my head with a thick creamy-yellow paste. ‘Don’t worry about the colour!’ she said. ‘It won’t look anything like this!’ Thirty minutes later she came back and shampooed it out. I looked in the mirror and was so shocked I could hardly speak. My mousy hair was now a dense, unmodulated brown, as if a furry thing had dropped from the beak of a high-flying raptor and landed on my head.
I took the heeler to my office, but he couldn’t deal with the stairs. He made it up to the first landing, then lost his nerve and lay flat on his belly, quivering and gazing at me imploringly. Somehow I urged him back down the steep staircase: his steps were as mincing as those of a girl in her first high heels. He kept his eyes fixed on his forefeet, each of which splayed as it took his weight.
In the cocktail bar the waitress, turning away from our table with her tray, placed her left hand, palm out, flat against the small of her back: a tiny gesture of professional composure. The first time she did it I was touched and wanted to laugh. The second time I felt more like crying, it was so delicate and graceful.
David and the kids played a wild game in the kitchen. He stood facing the closed back door and bent over, bracing his arms against the frame. The challenge was for each kid to take a run at him, leap, and kick his arse with both feet while completely airborne. Olive filmed a few attempts on the iPad, then laid it aside and queued for a turn. The rules were very strict and he kept making them stricter. The airborne factor was paramount. The two kicks had to be separate but in rapid succession. You had to take off from the right foot but also deliver the first kick with that same foot. Ted did it perfectly once: we heard his feet connect with David’s jeans, whack-whack, the unique flat sound of blows on denim. No one could match it. Everyone was shouting and laughing. When we looked at the little videos they were as dark and mysterious as paintings—David, turning from the door to declare the next rule, made masterful gestures with hands that showed white against his black jumper, and his voice on the faint soundtrack was a series of thick, low quacks.
My book is about to be published. I have worked on it for over seven years. To my amazement people keep asking me, before it’s even in the shops, ‘Have you started something else? What’s your next project?’ If you must know, I’m planning to lie on my bed for twelve months. Or, as Elena Ferrante says, ‘When you’ve finished a book, it’s as if your innermost self had been ransacked, and all you want is to regain distance, return to being whole.’
After the birthday party I stayed over at her house. It was a humid Sydney night. A small fan stood at the foot of the mattress I slept on, sending a quiet, steady airstream along me hour after hour. I dreamt I held a creamy little baby close to my chest all night; not my child, but it knew me, trusted me, and consented to sleep in my embrace. In the morning I had to catch an early plane. I slipped out of the house without waking anyone. The pavements were wet. A cab cruised close to me and blinked its lights. I got in. The driver was a young man in a white embroidered cap. He drove in silence through the industrial streets, and the light grew over the city murky with rain, the huge Sydney figs, the frames of new apartment blocks, slender cranes standing motionless among them. Neither of us spoke. Nothing was expected of me and I was grateful.
2015
PART FOUR
On Darkness
Punishing Karen
ONE Tuesday morning in August, a seventeen-year-old secondary student I’ll call Karen told her parents that she felt sick and wanted to stay home from school. They assumed she had a cold. But at about four in the afternoon, while her mother was outside washing the car, Karen gave birth, on hands and knees in her own bed, to a full-term baby boy.
She cut the umbilical cord with a pair of scissors. Then she gave the infant several hard punches to the head, wrapped him in a towel, put him on the floor beside her bed, and went into the bathroom to wash. While she was in the shower, her mother, who had not known Karen was pregnant, came back into the house and saw blood in her daughter’s bed. Karen said she had a very heavy period, but then her mother found the baby, bundled in his towel. She made up the bed freshly and let Karen sleep for a couple of hours. Then mother and daughter took the baby to hospital, where he was declared dead.
Karen claimed that in her exhaustion after the labour she had collapsed on top of the baby. But when Homicide detectives pointed out that such a fall could not explain the bruising, the haemorrhage and the eight areas of fracture that the autopsy had revealed, she confessed that she had struck the baby several times in the head, intending to kill him, for she did not want to keep him.
The prisoner who faced the judge from the dock at the Victorian Supreme Court was a slip of a girl with long, fine, dark hair, dressed like any teenager in low-slung pants and a cotton top. To hear the charge of infanticide read out against her, to be told that she had managed to conceal her pregnancy for its entire duration, had laboured furtively and in silence, and had delivered the infant alone, staining her girlhood bed with blood—this was terrible enough; but one’s mind veered away from the rest, as did one’s eyes from her downcast, expressionless, rather handsome profile. When she pleaded guilty to the charge the air in the court was thick with shock and pity.
Karen’s counsel sketched out a provincial Australian life poignant in its ordinariness. She was the eldest of three sisters. Her father, whose tough discipline and ‘yelling’ she feared while longing for his approval, was a fitter. Her mother was a part-time retail assistant. At the time of her baby’s birth and death she was in year twelve; she finished the year with a tertiary entrance score of 38.8, and was now studying visual arts at TAFE. She played in a basketball team and worked twenty hours a week in a supermarket. Several friends had accompanied her to court. Twenty-one people from her country town had produced character references.
She had had no further sexual relationships since she broke up with the child’s father, an unnamed person whose existence was otherwise never mentioned in the proceedings. Her mother, a kind-faced woman, told the court of her daughter’s distraught tears, her remorse, her need for comfort.
How should the court deal with such a girl? The judge’s face, one fancied, showed the distress felt by all those present. His brow was creased, his mouth turned down at the corners. The maximum penalty in Victoria for killing a child in the first twelve months of its life (after that, the charge becomes murder) is five years. The very notion of infanticide acknowledges that the balance of a new mother’s mind may remain disturbed for many months by the violent physiological changes of childbirth.
Only one expert witness gave evidence at the hearing: a clinician and researcher in the field of post-partum psychiatric illness. The psychiatrist introduced a further refinement: the concept of neonaticide, where a mother kills her baby within twenty-four hours of its birth. It’s during the first day of a baby’s life, said the witness, that it runs the greatest risk of being murdered. Almost half of the girls who conceal their pregnancy will kill their baby.
In many of these girls, the knowledge of the pregnancy never reaches a conscious level. Karen knew all right, but she ‘kept squashing the knowledge down’. She was childlike, said the psychiatrist, with little insight, poor judgment and few planning skills. She sought no antenatal care or advice, she didn’t consider an abortion. She ‘just kind of hoped it would all go away’. But in the panic and terror of giving birth alone, she entered a brief state of dissociative p
sychosis in which she killed the baby. Even the Crown offered no objection to this interpretation.
What is bewildering about these stories, and almost every woman knows of one, at second or third hand, is not only why a girl hides her pregnancy but how. How can her family, her intimates, fail month after month to see the obvious? Karen’s mother told the court that she had ‘suspected’ it when her daughter appeared to be putting on weight; but once Karen had denied it, she asked no further questions. It’s as if a girl’s iron refusal of her state can induce in others a sort of hysterical blindness.
It has been suggested by psychologists and anthropologists that most neonaticides remain undiscovered—that neonaticide is wired into humans, and that our disinclination to imprison these young mothers, and our pity for their plight, points to our unexpressed sense that newborns have not yet reached full human status.
Researchers say that girls’ will to deny pregnancy can be so powerful that they suppress the symptoms. They can give birth within earshot of other people, and not cry out; some even say they felt no pain. Some, when they return to awareness and find the dead infant, have no idea how it got there. Babies are found under beds, in cupboards, shoved into bags. One young woman put her dead baby into a filing cabinet that she shared with others at her office.