Becoming Kirrali Lewis

by Jane Harrison

  So that’s why she was armed with a screwdriver, to defend her stuff, I thought. Poor thing.

  The coroner asked what happened next.

  ‘I called the cops. She wouldn’t pipe down,’ the manager said. ‘Nothin’ else ya can do.’

  ‘He doesn’t seem too remorseful,’ I whispered to Erin.

  ‘These places are halfway houses. When they closed the mental institutions a few years back, people ended up at boarding houses or on the streets. He would have seen it all. Daily.’

  The next person called up was a social worker, carrying a file as thick as one of my law books. Her name was Vanessa. She was young and obviously a bit nervous but she spoke clearly and in a considered way. The coroner asked Vanessa about Mavis Berry’s upbringing. That’s when it got spooky.

  Mavis was thirty years old, born in 1955. Vanessa mentioned the name of the hospital and a country town. Erin leant forward.

  ‘That’s the year my sister was born. That’s the hospital.’

  She clutched my arm, hard.

  ‘Maybe lots of babies were born there,’ I whispered.

  ‘Yes, especially to Aboriginal mothers. There’s a big Aboriginal population in that town … and on the town fringes. But still ...’

  The coroner then asked the social worker to summarise Mavis’s childhood.

  ‘According to the records, her mother’s name was Meryl.’

  Erin was digging her nails into my forearm. ‘That’s my Mum’s name. Oh, Kirrali. My heart is beating so fast.’

  The social worker described how baby Mavis was taken from her very young mother and fostered into a white family. Although the details were sketchy, they were a supposedly a lovely family, quite devoted.

  ‘Unfortunately, the foster mother died when Mavis was three and the father couldn’t cope with his own grief and manage the two foster children, Mavis and a boy called Robert. The kids went back into the system and were split up.’

  The coroner asked, ‘Is that usual?’

  ‘Unfortunately, yes. For many children it is. Others are lucky and get the one family. We love those foster parents. Kids have a good outcome with them. But for Mavis, she was moved from home to home.’

  ‘How many placements in total?’

  ‘The records indicate that she had about twelve placements, some short term and others longer but none were for more than two years.’

  ‘Anything else that might be relevant?’ the coroner asked.

  ‘She might have been abused, it wasn’t clear. Some of the records are missing but there is one entry in the caseworker’s notes that seemed to suggest some kind of abuse, perhaps of a sexual nature. It appears that she was a rebellious kid who was drinking and out of control by the time she was fourteen. She stopped going to school. By sixteen, she was living on the streets, in and out of boarding houses in the company of older men. Within a few years, she was experiencing mental health issues.’

  The coroner asked if the caseworker had tried to reconnect Mavis with her birth family.

  ‘I don’t believe so,’ she said, skimming through the file. ‘The last record states that Mavis does not talk about her birth family and quotes her as saying, “They’re better off without me”. Mavis was about to turn eighteen and from then she had to fend for herself.’

  The social worker stepped down from the witness box and the coroner called a recess.

  Hearing that story, I realised it could have been mine. But I couldn’t think about that right now. Erin was freaking out. She was breathing heavily and looked distressed. Everyone else had filed out from the courtroom. The court orderly noticed that she was in trouble and asked if she needed assistance.

  Was she asthmatic or diabetic? Did he need to call an ambulance? Erin shook her head. We helped her outside to the fresh air.

  The social worker was having a cigarette and I asked Erin if she wanted to talk to her. We approached her together and Erin asked if she could find out more about Mavis, explaining the similarity between her story and her older sister’s. As they talked, the dates, names, places and events all lined up.

  ‘Mavis Berry has to be my sister.’

  The social worker agreed. It was a devastating moment. The social worker put her arms around Erin’s shoulder.

  ‘I can’t believe it. She was living two suburbs away from me. I can’t believe that the police killed her before we had the chance to meet her. This will break my mum’s heart all over again.’

  She just stood there, tears falling. Erin was crying for Mavis, she was crying for her family, she was crying for herself. She was crying for the whole damn lot of us. The whole sorry, damn, hurt, fucked-up lot of us.

  I rushed into the cinema, late, gabbling to Margaret about the buses being gridlocked because of an accident but she cut me short.

  ‘I know about Erin. More bloody family business.’ But Margaret’s grumble didn’t have the usual conviction to it. ‘Pity about her sister getting whacked and all.’

  ‘Whacked?’ I didn’t comprehend.

  ‘Don’t you watch any cop shows? Getting shot? Now get to work. You have to work twice as hard, ’cos sister girl ain’t here.’

  I’d been promoted so I put my uniform on and made my way over to the box office. Queuing up to buy tickets was a crowd of excited teenyboppers. Tonight was the opening night of a film starring Audria, the latest seventeen-year-old singing sensation. We were showing it on two screens to cope with the demand. The lines didn’t stop until well after I thought those twelve-year-olds should be in bed but at least it didn’t give me any time to dwell on Erin and Mavis.

  Shift over and Margaret did me a favour. Usually we have to count our own till to make sure the cash balanced with the number of tickets sold. Tonight she offered to do it for me. I was more than a bit amazed.

  ‘And tell Erin, I’m sorry. For what it’s worth …’ Margaret added as she shooed me off.

  Erin was right. Her bark was worse than her bite.

  I raced home, wanting to see Erin, but Kirk was sitting on the college steps waiting for me. I rushed towards him and we hugged.

  ‘Have you seen Erin? Is she okay?’

  ‘Not really. She’s gone back home for a bit.’

  ‘What about you?’ I felt shy. I really wanted to talk to him but the cold steps at 10.30pm were an uninviting place for an intense conversation. I decided to sneak him into my room even though I knew I would get kicked out if we were caught. Tonight I needed him. Stuff the rules.

  Kirk snuck out at 5am. He kissed my neck and whispered goodbye. I fell back into a deep sleep and when I woke up, I was in a determined mood. I couldn’t wait until my next appointment at Koori Family Connect. I would go in again today. I couldn’t bear the thought of putting it off — it being too late — for whatever reason.

  Thirteen

  I didn’t have any lectures that morning so I went straight down to Koori Family Connect. Doreen wasn’t at reception and I made my way down to Rosie’s office. Just outside her door, which was open a little, I paused when I heard her talking. You know when you hear your own name, how it cuts through the white noise? I couldn’t help it — I had to listen.

  ‘ ... could she be Kirrali Lewis’s mother? It’s a bit strange that it’s the only lead we’ve got. I know there’s a Taylor family down Gippsland way but I don’t know of a Cherie Taylor amongst them, do you Doreen?’

  ‘Like I said, the only Cherie Taylor I know is the one that works down at the Advancement Centre. You know her, eh, Rosie?’

  Rosie laughed. ‘We could follow that lead but ...’ She laughed again.

  ‘Kirrali might have more information when she comes in next. Otherwise, it’s a matter of waiting for another piece of the jigsaw to fall into place.’

  ‘I hope the girl’s patient then.’

  No, I’m not. I turned and walked back down the hallway and out of the building. Cherie Taylor. I had all I needed to know. Cherie Taylor who works at the Koori Advancement Centre. I remembered seeing a
pamphlet on it when I was at the Koori Legal Resource.

  I burst from the dingy office into the radiance of a perfect morning, my heart racing, and caught a tram back to uni. What now? I scrawled down a plan of action on the back of one of my cinema pay slips.

  Find out where the Koori Advancement Centre is — ask Kirk or Erin. Find out about Cherie Taylor. Was she my mother?

  I crossed out ‘was’ and wrote ‘is’. I couldn’t think of anything else to add.

  Now that there was a real possibility of meeting my mother, other questions began ricocheting around my mind. There was my biological dad, who was he? Jai had worked with his mother for three months and didn’t have an inkling that they were related. That must have been surreal. I couldn’t imagine that happening to me — and I didn’t know many Aboriginal people so it was unlikely that I was related to any of them. But what if I was related to Erin? That would mean I was related to Kirk. What if he was my uncle or cousin? I’d slept with him. Shit. I’d heard of that kind of thing happening — a couple in England got married and then found out they were brother and sister who had been separated at birth. And there were a lot less of us Aboriginal people than English people, so maybe the chances of that kind of thing happening were higher.

  Why hadn’t I considered this before? I had to know the truth. In a panic, I jumped off the tram at the next stop. Uni would have to wait. I would try and find the Centre instead.

  I looked around for a phone box and spied one at the next corner. When I got there, there was no phone book. Typical. I ran up the road looking for another phone box. Instead, I saw another tram rattling its way towards me. I lengthened my stride into a sprint and beat it to the next stop. I rode the tram to the next set of shops where I found another couple of phone booths. Thankfully, one was empty and it had a phone directory.

  Koori Advancement Centre. Maybe it was listed under Aboriginal something. Eureka, to use an old expression of my dad’s. Koori Advancement Centre. Beck Street. By tram, it was only minutes away from where I was standing.

  I pondered my options. I could go over, just check this Cherie Taylor out from a distance. See if she was the right age. Rosie had laughed — maybe she was like seventy or something and couldn’t possibly be my mother. I promised myself that’s all I would do, sneak a look. A sneak preview, like the film trailers at the cinema. That way I could prepare myself and then go back to see Rosie and organise to meet her through the proper channels. Having a look wouldn’t hurt. I’d make sure she didn’t see me so she wouldn’t know later that I’d been spying on her.

  A tram pulled up and I climbed on board in a trance. I got off at Beck Street. The Koori Advancement Centre building was easy to recognise on the corner, Aboriginal flag flying. It was a big building, like a factory, with a striking mural painted along one side. Kooris in chains. A traditional hunter with his spear. A family being massacred, a row of guns pointed at their heads.

  My legs were shaking as I approached the entrance. I paused and took a deep breath. I thought about Mum, not for the first time that day. How could my birth mother ever live up to the mum I’d always known? I remember when I was about five and I became fascinated by Mum’s necklace — it had a small silver cross set with a diamond.

  ‘Pretty isn’t it, Kirrali?’ she said, unclasping it to give me a closer look. ‘It was given to me by my mother.’

  I touched the sparkly stone in it. A real diamond.

  ‘Would you like it?’ she asked softly.

  I nodded just a tiny bit. Gifts were modest in our house, on account of there being five kids. Bea hadn’t been adopted then. She put the necklace around my neck where it hung almost to my belly button. Later, in my teens, I reflected that it should have been passed on to one of her biological daughters, Rochelle, the oldest perhaps, but Mum made no such distinction. We were all equal in her eyes. I’ve worn that cross every day since. I touched it now, reassured by all the love it represented.

  In my recent musings about my birth mother, I had imagined her as a big jolly kind of woman with a heaving bosom wearing a floral dress. Now, as I walked towards the reception desk, I laughed at my inner vision. That was Mum. This one would probably be skinny and flat-chested.

  Oh God, who cared what she looked like, as long as she was nice. The stress of it all was making me go mad. Anyway, it wasn’t as if I was going to talk to her — heaven forbid! A sneak preview, just like at the cinema.

  The woman at reception was a thin scowling Koori woman. Oh hell.

  ‘Yes?’ she said suspiciously. I gulped.

  ‘I’m wondering if Cherie Taylor is here,’ I croaked, hoping I wasn’t standing in front of her.

  ‘In there. Hanging an exhibition.’ She pointed her lips in the direction of a door at the end of a dark corridor. A few metres is a long way when your life is about to crack open like a coconut.

  The door swung open easily and light flooded in from the high windows. Dazzling white walls were half-hung with an assortment of paintings. Multi-coloured dots leapt out of their black backgrounds. A sombre painting showed an image of an Aboriginal man swinging from a noose. Another featured loose brushstrokes representing a crow in full flight, its wings outspread.

  Two women were standing either side of a huge abstract painting — a collision of stars in swirls of colour against a night sky — trying to manoeuvre it up onto the wall and laughing as it missed the hook again and again.

  I tried not to stare at the Aboriginal woman. It was hard to tell how old she was. She had big generous hips, shining wavy brown hair — not frizzy like mine — and a sweet face. She let out a booming laugh that made her calves wobble. Not a grump like the woman at reception.

  Finally, the painting hung in place. The other woman stood back looking at it from all angles, while the Aboriginal woman headed towards me, picking up a packet of cigarettes off the floor on the way. I should have made a discreet exit. But everything fell away. I stood there, immobile.

  When she saw me, her face broke into a smile that went right up to her eyes. ‘Yeah, bub?’ she asked kindly.

  Bub. She called me ‘bub’.

  ‘You’re my mother …?’ It was half statement, half question. Her reaction was unexpected. She burst out laughing. ‘I don’t think so. I’m only thirty-two, bub. You do the maths.’

  ‘But aren’t you Cherie Taylor?’

  She stared at me — it could have been for five seconds but it felt like an hour. My heart was thumping wildly. She turned slowly towards the other woman, who was still adjusting the painting they’d just hung. She nodded in her direction and kept walking.

  My head seemed to explode in a dazzling white fog. I couldn’t stop myself. I took a step towards the other woman. The white woman.

  ‘Cherie Taylor?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You’re Cherie Taylor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I searched her face for something — recognition, a dawning sense of relief, acknowledgement. Joy would have been too much to expect but all I saw was a look of fear. That’s when I knew for sure that she was my mother.

  Fourteen

  She didn’t have to say anything else. I knew who she was. She was the child I had given birth to eighteen years earlier. The child I’d signed away. Now she was a young woman standing before me. ‘Let’s go somewhere,’ I said quietly.

  I turned and walked out the door, assuming that she would follow me. Somehow my trembling legs got me outside to the car park but she wasn’t behind me. I waited but she didn’t appear. I knew I should go back inside but I couldn’t. So I unchained my bike and pedalled home.

  I should explain who I am. Cherie Taylor. I am five-foot-eight (I pre-date metric when it comes to height). I have sort-of-blonde hair, green eyes and a too-big mouth. I don’t wear make-up and I like wearing cotton. I vote for the Nuclear Disarmament Party. I’ve never owned a house so I’ve never had a mortgage. I’m allergic to the suburbs — you know, two cars, 2.4 kids, the open-plan entertaining area, the pa
rents’ retreat. I always wondered, why have kids if you need to retreat from them?

  I live in the inner city in a cute little apartment, just big enough for one human and one cat. After growing up in the suburbs, I wouldn’t live anywhere else. I have a degree in Community Development and I work in arts administration. I’ve never been married. I have no children. Or that’s what I’ve told every one for the past eighteen years. No one has cause to disbelieve me since I am known for my brutal honesty.

  For the last fifteen years or so, I have volunteered a couple of days a week at the Koori Advancement Centre, an organisation set up to assist Aboriginal people.

  It’s not always easy being a white woman working in a Koori environment. Some Koori people, not all, are suspicious of my motives. I too, would be suspicious of the dominant race after two hundred years of suffering and racism. You want to help — and that’s exactly what Koori people don’t want and don’t usually need — so it can be frustrating on both sides. But I’ve often found that once a Koori person trusts you, you have a friend for life. And there are other reasons why I work at the Centre. The most important one just walked into my life.

  When I first started volunteering, Barbara, a young woman who was working in the front office, didn’t say a word to me for six months. Every morning she’d nod to me and that was it. Then one day, back in 1972, we were at a rally supporting the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. Not many white people were marching for Aboriginal rights in those days and a television reporter came up to me wanting some pithy statement for the news. I told him to talk to the people that counted and I thrust Barbara towards him. She made a superb statement and it was on the news that night.

  After that things were different between us. It wasn’t being on TV that made Barbara warm to me. It was that she could trust me not to speak on her behalf.

  Since then Barbara and I have grown closer and closer, to the point where I could say she was one of my best friends. She’s loyal, she’s funny and we trust each other. Best friend, huh! I trusted her but not enough to tell her about my illegitimate Koori child.