Everywhere I Look (22 page)

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 psychosis 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.