Sawdust (11 page)

Sitting there in our best outfits, I remember noting a sparse crowd in the court,
people I did not recognise, people probably waiting for the appearance of their own relatives and friends. There was also a policeman, some officials in black, and then came the moment we had been waiting for.

Dad was brought in.

We kids were sitting in a row, and what I saw was Dad standing there shaking his big square head like a man who had never done anything wrong in his life. In his long black pants and smart white shirt, it was like he could not understand why the universe had chosen him of all the people in the world to make an example of.

His head just hung, but it was not with the shame of a man who had done anything wrong; it was with the shame of a man bitterly disappointed that he had been caught. A man who had let himself – and perhaps all other men on the planet – down.

He looked up and you could see the questions in his eyes: Who were these people to judge him? What did they know of hard work and family? What did they know of his relationship with his own kin? Before him he saw stupid police and a law that did not
get it
. And
these
people were pointing fingers
at him
.

Dad was asked if we were the children, and he nodded his head. At least he agreed about that. Eventually he was asked if he did it, the things he was accused of, and all I can remember is Dad, like a bird after a bath, rustling his neck and shivering his head, a man looking deeply offended.

‘No, I did not.’ He called out, confident, strong.

I saw a dry swelling in his eyes; it was coming in my direction. It hit beneath my dress and stabbed into my chest, saying: ‘Why the hell am I here?’

He was accusing me. Again, like at the police station, I felt a deep and painful heat reach from my throat and swell in my shoes.

In the end, at the conclusion of the examination, Dad was given a non-custodial sentence with an undertaking to do time in a rehabilitation centre. And so, believe it or not, after the hearing we all climbed into the car and went home together. Mum, Dad and all us kids.

The entire journey, which was about twenty minutes from Gladstone, all Dad could gripe about was why Mum had dressed me the way she had. He said I looked so young – implying it was because of my youth, because of my appearance, that made them believe there was something wrong with him. I was the reason, the way Mum dressed me, that he had to go and spend time in a rehabilitation centre. For my part, it was difficult to see how he was not sitting there threatening to punish us all for standing in court against him.

In the end, the relief to all of us was that he was not home for long. It was almost like he only came home to change, pack his bags and then he was off again, in fact the very next day – to the rehab detention centre, which was down the coast in Bundaberg.

For us left behind, there was no victory celebrations, no special drinks or feasts, everything remained just like it was, no questions asked, no questions answered.

If Mum was making a song of Dad’s going, it certainly wasn’t to us kids. From memory, she made a point of telling everyone she could about it. All her adult friends. How she had nabbed the bugger, our father who just happened to be her husband, and he was now in rehab detention. We kids only ever heard the natter at the margins. Never the detail. So it was hard to be sure exactly what she said.

For us kids it was just like any other day. It didn’t even matter that Dad wasn’t there. The world went round, and just like when Dad was there, our only concern was eating all our vegies or risking a beating if we didn’t.

On the real point at hand, the one we had been to the police and now all the way to the courts about, nothing was said, taught or learnt. The world was silent on the subject, the world out there, as well as the one inside.

If there was a lesson in it, it was one that came despite our own thoughts; it came through seeing most of our relatives and friends withdrawing from us.

Somehow, after the court case, the rellies seemed to find a way to avoid us – and I can’t even remember Dad’s friends like Cec Parsons or the other men being around after that. Even Aunty Bev, even my warm-handed Aunty Bev, much as it hurts to remember it, withdrew from us.

People also started to stare at us. I became acutely aware of being looked at and regarded by others in a particular way. The worst were the kids at school. Suddenly they were not friendly, and even the couple of close friends I had, began to keep a distance.

After a couple of weeks, we went to visit Dad one day, all of us, off to Bundaberg to see the man who was supposed to be our protector. He was in a ward full of other men, and all I remember is feeling deeply sorry for him.

Peering up at us from his bed, the tall, proud man with the square chin and the deliberating gap between his front teeth, who once stood solid like wood among us, was so doped up he could hardly keep his eyes open.

It was like, quite literally, he wasn’t even a quarter the man he used to be. Like a withered tree, he heaved in shallow breaths, and all he could mumble was: ‘I have to get out of here. I have to get out of here.’

The worst part was I was convinced I had destroyed him. The extraordinarily long, half-live figure in the bed was breathing its last. No longer could he be where he needed to be or who he was meant to be: at home, with his kin, the hardwood frame of his family.

Dad was away for months. Two things stick out in my memory about this time. The first is that the longer Dad was away the sadder Mum became. I guess, a bit like me, without saying anything, she blamed herself. The second, which should have been a benefit but nobody seemed to remark about it, was that with Dad away, instead of Mum becoming more agitated and more frustrated with having us kids on her hands as well as everything else she needed to do on the property, life actually calmed down.

During the time of Dad’s absence, I can hardly even remember Mum shouting at us – well, other than to eat our vegies. And since she shouted at me and slapped me around the most, there definitely had to be something to be said for that.

And yet we missed Dad. And I discovered an unfortunate truth: we get used to a certain way of living and no matter how bad, how poisoned that way might be, once the destructive element is removed, we actually miss it.

In the same way now, calm as our world had become, without Dad it felt uncomfortable, like there was a niggling gap. Madness? Masochism? Yes, madness and masochism. But there it was. We were living on earth, but it was a different earth. It felt different without our Lord Protector around.

Outside our house it really was different. Everyone had taken to treating us like we had the plague. I was barely a teenager, Mum was living through hell, and people were lifting their noses at us.

If the absence of the relatives was visible, it was the absence of Aunty Bev that hurt the most. It is still difficult to work out, to get my head around, but I suppose that’s how it is, even if it isn’t your fault, it’s like you are tainted.

Abuse doesn’t just taint the abuser, it taints what the abuser has touched. I felt like I had been soiled with a tarnished brush and could never wash the grime from my skin. It was literally like I had an incurable disease.

As though to prove it, even though we were already bigger kids by now, well Jim and me, I remember clearly standing outside the sandpit at school one day and asking a school friend if I could hop in and play with her.

‘No,’ she looked at me with a distinct curl on her lips. ‘I can’t play with you anymore. You’ve been manhandled.’

Another girl, even more blatantly told me, ‘I can’t play with you, you’re dirty.’

On a more positive note, a very good friend at school broke down in tears one day and confessed, ‘I want to play with you, Deb. I do. But I’m not allowed to.’

The reality was we had all been discoloured with the shoddy strokes of a single bad brush. The bristles on Dad’s brush were not even shoddy they were contagious; but it appeared he was definitely right about one thing: no one but no one would understand.

For all the negativity, there was something that came out of the episode. And it was this: the more the kids at school told me I was dirty, soiled, rotten, and had been
manhandled
, the more, oh yes the more I felt degraded –
but also
– the more it made me look at myself, at the reality of my life.

I was beginning to develop as a woman and the message was beginning to come home: what was going on with Dad was not right.

All these accusers, cruel and demeaning as they were, had a point. What I was doing was, yes, filthy and dirty – but maybe, despite what Dad said, it was also wrong. Their words were just so hard to shake off, and they would follow me from primary school into high school. There would always be a batch of kids who “knew”.

At home, something else was happening. The hard reality was that after months in rehab detention, and with Dad supposedly healthy and cured from his wild royal fantasies, he was back ensconced in the house again.

No matter what I did or thought, my being was still inexorably bound to this tall, unbreakable shaft that stood at the centre of my life and taught me all its irreversible lessons.

Around this time there was a new progression:
when Dad took me aside, he would read to me. Well, maybe it was more like, would read to me and show me pictures. He had these little magazines that he would take out. I don’t know what they were called or where they came from, but they were small in shape and contained both pictures and drawings. Not of Snow White or Cinderella like most children would want to see, but of men and women in various fantastic poses. The text too was also not exactly Noddy or even The Secret Seven.

Dad loved reading to me from these magazines. It was about as close as he ever got to reading anything to me.

So, while most children were just developing out of fairy stories and into young teen reading, and while my dad was meant to be back from detention a rehabilitated man, I was viewing the breathless stories of people explaining in easy to understand, very straight and plain English how fucking felt to them. How it always felt so incredibly delightful, clean and scrumptious.

Everyone in the pictures, it cannot be denied, looked so unbelievably pleased with their acrobatics and the positions they assumed, that it was impossible, even for me, not to take my eyes off them.

(An aside: I also remember at this time having a couple of large black encyclopaedia-size hard cover books in my bedroom that were called
The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales
.
Of course, they were books owned and borrowed by many kids around the world at the time, but how they came to be in our house, I don’t know. I would like to imagine it was Aunty Bev, but really I do not know. Probably they were some of the richer neighbours’ throw-outs. In any event, once I started reading them, I loved to lose myself in the make-believe fantasy of them. If only Dad was the sort of man who was capable of reading those books to us, how different life may have been? How different life may have been for all of us kids?)

‘Get over here, Deb,’ Dad would call out with that playful manly roughness of his. ‘I want to show you a magazine.’ Alone with Dad, I cannot deny, the magazines had an effect on me. In fact, there were times when I asked Dad
not
to read to me from them for one simple reason: they turned me on – so much so that I could not fully comprehend my own thinking. I was beginning to distrust what I would do.

But more usually than not, as I lay back on the bed, my dress flipped up and my legs wide open, he would read to me from the pages and show me the pictures. At the same time, of course, he would rub himself against my vagina, something he knew by now how to do with amazing ease and expertise. It happened time and time and time again.

On one of these occasions, aged thirteen, yes, just barely a teenager, I was so agitated, so frantic, or to put it more bluntly, so moist with excitement and arousal, that something could not stop my little girl hands from... pulling him into me.

Christ. Christ. And Christ again
.
I cringe, I cry, I beat my breasts; even to this day, at fifty years old, I cannot get the image out of my head – that it was
my
fault. Well, it was me who pulled him into me, wasn’t it? If I didn’t do that, despite everything, despite everything he had done in the past, he may never have gone
that far
.

In later years, I would begin to see how it is that our bodies respond instinctively and betray us, yes betray. It’s not like we want to encourage or even plan for it to happen but betrayal, it seems, is something innate in our bodies. How could I blame anyone – including myself – for that?

I cry from inside my chest, but the strange thing is after that first encounter I felt like I had matured and grown up. I felt like I had become a woman. I felt like I was now a knowledgeable young person of the world. I was
advanced
for my age. It was amazing to actually know what people meant when they said that word sex. More than that, I knew now what it meant to lose one’s virginity. It was pleasurable, it was dizzying, and, yes, yes, it was intoxicating to feel and be felt like a woman.

There is one emotion I still feel more than any other: guilt. It is my life-sentence.

But for me there were to be other occasions. On one of those occasions – Mum gone again, yes, Mum away again – and Dad kept me home from school. We were going to some event late that afternoon, it could have even been a funeral, from memory, and Dad pulled me into his bedroom and made me have sex with him before we left.

I remember this particular occasion because afterwards I wore a pad in my underwear, a sanitary pad to stop the leakage. To keep from spotting my panties with what my father had left inside me. I felt so grown up wearing that pad, to find a solution that prevented that awful leakage from being noticed.