I never went back to the weed, at least.
Two months after I arrive in the psych ward, I’m told I am ready to leave. My psychologist asks, ‘How do you feel about going home soon?’
I want to say: Not good. But I am ashamed of how much I enjoy being here. I am ashamed at how little I want to go home to my parents and the girls’ empty bedrooms.
‘Sure,’ I say.
A couple of days later, I pack my things. My parents are coming to pick me up after breakfast. I throw into my bag the few clothes and toiletries I have, all the diaries and books I have collected.
In the communal area Jack approaches me. ‘I have a present for you. It’s been sitting in our garage for years, since the kids had mice when they were little.’
I stand, and for the first time feel a little excited at the prospect of leaving. In one of our sessions I told him I wanted to get a mouse when I got out of hospital.
He nods towards the nurses’ desk. There’s a large cage sitting on the counter. I run over to it, smiling. Thanking him. I am a child again, not a nineteen-year-old woman with two dead sisters and two sad parents.
Mum and Dad have agreed to let me get a mouse, and earlier that week we made plans to stop by the pet store on the way home. Before they pick me up, Charlotte and I swap phone numbers and email addresses. This won’t be the last time I see her.
Being physically restrained, forced into and then locked inside a padded cell is one of the most freeing things that ever happened to me.
If I had my time on the ward over, I would have made better use of the opportunity. I would have screamed and kicked and punched the padded walls and lain down on the floor and cried snot all over the softness every day. I would have shouted swear words at the nurses and called them names and told them how pissed off I was at the world. I would have been rude and refused to calm down or cooperate or behave like they wanted me to. I would have been too loud and too red-faced and breathed so shallowly that I could feel all the anxiety and grief and anger that had been sitting in my stomach for so long rise up into my throat until it came tumbling out of my mouth. I would have performed my grief.
I would have shown them what I couldn’t tell them.
And then, having exhausted myself, I would have sat down quietly and cried and cried until someone came to hug me and rock me and I blew snot into the corner of their shirt and used up a whole box of tissues even though I knew it wasn’t good for the environment because I didn’t care about anything, couldn’t see anything except my own grief.
And then when someone came to me, unable to express themselves, I would know what they needed: the space to perform their emotions.
And maybe this story would have ended more appropriately than injecting heroin into my veins and letting strangers insert body parts inside me because I didn’t know how to say please, someone hold me.
This is what grief looks like: an inability to speak.
7
In the lead-up to Christmas, my mother’s words keep playing in my head: ‘Last time you missed Christmas with us you were upset and messaged me all day saying you wished you were with us and you regretted being in the Philippines. You watch, the same thing will happen this year.’ It is the summer of 2016. I am twenty-eight years old.
But Christmas comes and goes and the solitude feels restorative, not lonely. My mother and I start talking again when she sends me a text on Christmas Eve:
How’s Hayden?
As usual, I am shocked at the things she knows. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been hanging out with a new boy. He is my friend Izzy’s friend, and her long-ago ex. I had told Mum this fact but wouldn’t give away his name. My mother is known for stalking people on Facebook. Sometimes, she accidentally adds them and I get a message from a friend asking why my mother, who they’ve never met, wants to be friends.
When I went home a few nights before Christmas to see my parents, Mum refused to come to dinner with Dad and me. Dad was afraid to upset her and thought it best that we not go at all if she wasn’t going to come. I sat in front of my mother and tried to tell her how I felt.
‘Why would I want to come to dinner when you obviously don’t want to spend time with me or anyone else in this family?’ she asked.
I tried to explain that my sitting out of this year’s Christmas had nothing to do with how much I loved them and far more to do with whatever solitude-craving and grief-healing was going on inside me at this time.
‘I need space to find my own self, separate from you and Dad.’
She said I was talking rubbish, that I was selfish and how could I do this to them when she had done so much for me over the years. ‘I pulled you off the streets when you were on heroin, I didn’t say a word when you were working as a prostitute . . .’
I was gobsmacked. I had been wondering how much she knew. It is a fun family fact that if you leave your diary on the kitchen counter Dad won’t read it, but Mum will.
For years, I’ve kept my diaries hidden in layers of boxes, clothing and other business, in a large orange chest in my study at their place. My annual three-month trips abroad meant leaving them at my parents’ place was the only option. My mother became aware of them over time, but I’d always hoped she would respect my privacy.
How did you know it was Hayden I was seeing?
Mothers know everything, she replies.
One answer for one answer, I text back. He’s good. I’m seeing him again in a couple of days. How’d you find out?
Months ago, when Izzy was getting her will written up, I remember that you and he were her legal will guardian people. So I knew it was him and I remembered his name.
Jesus Christ.
He has a ‘normal’ full-time job and doesn’t often smoke so she approves of my seeing him enough to use it to restart our relationship.
I swing in and out of shame in the company of my mother.
When I find out I’ve been accepted into a week-long writing program in New York, I call my parents to tell them the good news. My mother jokes that she could come too.
‘Yes,’ I laugh, ‘you should.’
A few days later, my father calls me: ‘Are you really okay with Mum coming to New York?’
I pause. ‘Uh, sure,’ I say, dragging the second word out in my mouth.
(Later, a friend tells me her psych used to interrupt her every time she said ‘sure’, because apparently she only ever used it when she meant the opposite.)
‘Really?’ Dad asks, offering space I am unable to take.
By this time, I’ve decided to stay for a couple of months. After I posted on Facebook saying I was going to New York, a woman I met in Budapest the year before asked if I wanted to housesit and water their plants in the West Village while she and her partner were in Bali.
‘Not for the whole time,’ I tell my father. ‘But she can come for a week, ten days at the most.’ It’s true that I don’t mind, but it is also true that I am trying to do something good.
When I am researching flights later that month my mother says: ‘Can you book it so I’m in New York for two weeks, plus two days either side for the flights?’
‘Sure,’ I say, feeling ashamed of the resistance inside me.
I’ve been dreading returning to western Sydney, and in particular to my parents’ home in Hoxton Park. These are the things that happen when I do:
From the airport, after another three-month stint abroad, I catch the train to Leppington Station, where my parents have left my car, the keys Blu-Tacked to the wheel guard. My sisters are buried at Leppington Cemetery, not far from the station. I only visit them when I can’t avoid it: a birthday, Christmas, an anniversary—the thin blankets trying to stem the July cold coming up through the ground. I should visit them more often, I think.
But I’m learning to be gentle with myself, and I do not want to go there, to the
rows and rows of unmown headstones and wilting flowers. I picture Carlie’s face and smile and think maybe that’s enough for today.
And then the traffic light goes green and I pull out onto Cowpasture Road, turn the radio on and listen to the announcer talking about how sleep, diet and exercise are the key to a good life. I’m trying to have a good life, am slowly putting the structures in place to facilitate this. What is more difficult is trying to be a good person when I still don’t know exactly what that means.
I go to my hairdresser’s place. She’s a nice woman, a close family friend who lives opposite the house my parents built for us three girls right before Carlie and Lisa died. She runs a salon from home, where a constant stream of middle-aged mothers and grandmothers pass through, talking about topics that make me feel sad:
‘The wedding cost fifty thousand dollars so I don’t think we’ll ever get to go overseas.’
‘You want to go to Cuba? Aren’t you afraid of terrorists?’
‘I’ll tell you the secret to short stories. You just write bullshit.’
And other such things.
And then, a lover calls and tells me a story about the time he stayed in a Formule 1 hotel. And I think of the Hume Highway which runs through Liverpool and leads to a Formule 1 hotel I once stayed at with the intention of seeing some clients there.
Afterwards, I go to Liverpool Westfield to get my eyebrows waxed and borrow a book from the library, and as I walk around I think to myself that I should put lipstick or at least lip gloss on because the friends I used to hang out with when I was secretly working as a hooker still frequent this place.
Once, after I’d stopped working, I ran into an old friend at Marconi, an Italian club where everyone went to watch soccer and drink beer and gossip and try to look good, and he said, ‘Can I ask you a question? I heard a rumour.’ And my heart leapt out of my chest because I knew the question he was going to ask. He was going to say: ‘I heard you worked as a prostitute. Is it true?’ and so before he could ask this my face flushed red and I said ‘No, you can’t ask me a question’ and changed the topic of conversation to something less dangerous for my mental health.
Visiting the shopping centre in Liverpool, every year or two, I am constantly afraid I will run into someone who will ask—or be thinking—that same question. And my response is to make sure I look half decent so they won’t laugh behind my back and say, ‘Who would pay to fuck her? She has a double chin now.’
That’s what I am afraid of. Getting older and growing fatter and uglier and people from western Sydney thinking: She’s not even that hot.
That happened to me once. I had an agreement with a boy I was dating while I was secretly working. We promised each other ‘radical honesty’ because we thought we were different from the masses toiling through their lives indifferently, and so he told me one day, ‘You’re a nice girl, but not that hot,’ and another day said my tits were saggy. I was the first girl he’d slept with and although I didn’t realise it at the time, the only boobs he’d seen were in porn films or magazines. I was eighteen but my chest was already a DD, and it didn’t occur to me until many years later that actually my breasts were not saggy, and he’d had no realistic point of comparison beyond small breasts or the augmented large ones he saw in films.
He did like to watch porn, I remember.
I don’t think of myself as particularly attractive. When I was working, I took comfort in my youth. My clients were much older than me. I was also very slim at the time from the amount of marijuana I was smoking. My physical insecurities mostly stem from my weight. Together, my youth and slimness were enough to make me feel confident. And at the same time I feel incredibly aware of how little those things should matter. How much youth and weight are notions of beauty pushed onto women from childhood. Still, at the time, their hands on my body felt harsher than their eyes. And so I think about these things as I move through the shopping centre and I feel kind of overwhelmed but also kind of indifferent, or at least I try to be. And then I think to myself: You think this is bad? Wait until you release a book that admits you worked as a prostitute and then have to come back to these places and think about who you might run into.
And I think about how, sometimes, people ask, ‘How do you think your parents are going to feel when they read this?’
Or: ‘Don’t you feel bad, using your sisters’ deaths to get a book published?’
And I want to say: If you can show me another way to stop taking heroin, to stop fucking strange men, to stop cutting the inside of my left wrist, tell me, and I’ll do it. Writing is the thing that gives my days meaning, the thing that pushes me to self-reflect and heal. Publishing is the externally-imposed deadline that holds me accountable to these needs.
Instead, I say, ‘Sometimes, yes.’
Later that night, my parents and I have dinner in their backyard, the three of us pushing iceberg lettuce, tinned beetroot, artichoke and ham around our plates. Artichoke is not a usual addition. Last week, I mentioned offhandedly that I like artichoke, while telling some family friends about the pizza in Italy.
‘They put whole artichokes on it,’ I said.
‘Since when do you eat artichokes?’ was my mother’s response.
‘What? I love them!’
I suspect my mother was surprised, possibly a little hurt. She prides herself on knowing more about me than I know about me. And so, the next time I turn up for dinner at Mum and Dad’s there are artichokes at the ready. She’s good like that.
The three of us carry our dinner outside, to the long table under our back pergola. The table is massive—large enough to seat a party of twelve or fourteen if needed. It is a leftover from the house my father built for us girls. As I pluck leaves off an artichoke and push them into my mouth, my mother speaks across the table: ‘Are you up to the bit about Charlotte in your memoirs yet?’
I nearly spit the artichoke back onto my plate. Something like shame or anger or both rears up within me. I try to think quickly. This is too much, too painful, too shameful. This is not something I can talk about.
‘Yes, I’m done, it’s fine,’ I say, wanting her to move on. My mother is good at introducing big subjects out of nowhere.
‘Do you remember you gave her all that money?’ It is barely seven, but the light-filled summer evening air feels spoilt by her remarks.
‘Mum, no, stop.’ A magpie lands on a chair at the far end of the table.
‘Do you remember, Maurice? How she gave Charlotte all that money, and then we had to tell her we needed money for the house so we could take the rest out of her bank account so she didn’t give it to her.’
‘Mum, stop.’ I do not remember the incident she is talking about, many of those years now lost to time, drugs, traumatised memory and shame-fuelled forgetting. But my stomach is flashing with fragments of the one event I do remember:
Charlotte’s curls hanging to her waist when we first met in the youth psych ward; how big her world seemed to me, with her daughter living with her mother in Brisbane, her stories of tripping on acid with friends in Centennial Park, of attending the Mardi Gras Parade in Sydney each year, of having lived in four different cities in Australia; of the three times she’d been raped, twice by men she knew; her quiet demeanour—soft-spoken without a lot to say, and which seemed to suggest the world would take advantage of her before she took advantage of it; me begging my parents to let her come and live with us after we got out of the psych ward. Their refusal. Leaving home to meet up with her a few weeks after I got out of hospital. My mother, begging and crying for me not to go. Me going anyway.
Suddenly, I am back in the toilet cubicle at Sydney’s Central Station. It is damp. I am nervous: in a heightened state and more aware of the noise and colours around me. But Charlotte has done this before.
It feels like this was my idea. Although she first suggested picking up some of the stuff, I tell
myself it was I who instigated it when I said, ‘Let’s go out and do something crazy.’ How was she to know I wasn’t referring to heroin?
When Charlotte pushes the cubicle door shut behind us, the first thing I notice is the sounds. Like those heard with your ear pressed against a wall, straining to hear what’s happening next door, the sounds are audible, but muffled. Two stand out most, and my ears alternate between one and the other. The train master’s voiceover and then footsteps.
‘The train on platform twelve will leave in seven minutes. This train stops at Redfern, Hurstville, Sutherland and then all stations to Cronulla.’
When I suggest buying alcohol swabs from the chemist, she laughs at me. Not a mean, you-have-no-idea laugh, more a you’re-so-cute-because-you-have-no-idea-where-this-will-lead laugh. I nod and laugh along with her.
Inside the cubicle, she tells me to take a seat on the toilet, while she crouches on the floor. I think this is kind of her and take it as a sign she is a good person. She asks if I have anything, and I ask what she means.
‘In your blood.’
I frown and tilt my head to one side.
‘HIV?’ she asks, and my neck tightens in surprise.
‘I don’t know, I don’t think so, not that I know of,’ I say. ‘I’ve never done this before.’
She nods, but doesn’t say anything in response. She takes my arm and pulls me forward so I am leaning my elbow on her knee. She undoes the belt around her jeans, mutters something about it not being the best, then loops it through the gap between my arm and chest and back around the front. As she does this, her hand pushes against my breast. I only vaguely register this because all I can hear are those two sounds: the train master’s voiceover and footsteps. The train master’s voiceover and footsteps.
‘The next train goes to Cronulla,’ I tell her, wondering how far Cronulla is. I’ve not spent much time in the city centre before. I look down and my upper arm is split in two, the flesh from the top half pushing out over the leather belt digging into it. She wipes my inner elbow clean with her hand. Flicks my vein.
The Girls Page 11