Sawdust (14 page)

I was beginning to fight them back on both fronts now:
Mum as well as Dad.

I remember once, in one of her rampages against me – which could be for anything, like not hanging up the washing or not hanging it up properly – she was calling me a slut and a bitch and saying what she usually did in those moods: ‘No wonder things happen to you!’

This time, age fourteen going on fifteen, I turned around and slapped her. Yes, I slapped my mum. That word “bitch” struck a chord in me. It locked right into my solar plexus.

Unfortunately, good as the slap felt in the moment, it didn’t stop Mum. Once she’d recovered from the shock, I saw that look coming into her face, that severe, pointy look, that snort of the nose that said:
Retaliation
.

I ran through the house to get away from her and she chased me around and around until I finally made it into to my bedroom where I jumped like a falling parachute onto the first bed in the room. It was my sister’s bed, and as I jumped I pushed my head into my shoulders and face into the bed, knowing I would need to protect myself so that Mum could not see my face to slap it or perhaps even punch it.

What I didn’t see on the bed was the old metal laundry basket, which was filled to the brim. As I jumped, trying to flip onto my back, I smashed my backbone up against the edge of it. I was stunned and in pain and turned around to Mum in agony.

It was too late. She was already slapping me. Only in all honesty, on this occasion, I think she was slapping me to bring me around because I was crying but no sound was coming out of my mouth; it had taken my breath away.

I don’t know. It’s hard to say; in those days, when I did something wrong, Mum had taken to chucking me on the ground and then pinning her knees into my shoulders and punching me with a boxer’s fury in my back. So, I don’t know. To this day, I’m still unsure.

But in truth, could I blame her? It was obvious she was not just reacting to me, she was reacting to everything, to the people and pressures and inexplicable events around her. With her soft-glowing brown eyes, her full “c’mon lips”, and attractive round face, she was still married to Dan Gallagher, had four kids, lived on an intensely dry and needy property, and in effect, without much support, her life was a misery.

No wonder she sometimes blew out to a hundred kilos. Which was no joke when she was pinning me down on the floor and smashing her fists into my back. But I can see it now, the frustration, the anger, the fury that was aimed at her own life.

In the background, other things were happening at that time.

I was starting to make my own clothes, and full-on fifteen now Dad was starting to make sure I was wearing the appropriate clothing for the dances we were allowed to go to. I know one would expect Dad was ensuring I sew my way into long dresses and tight-collared shirts or, at the least, considering the times, close to knee-length skirts and near completely done-up tops.

Well that was almost true – with the exception of one pair of blue satin hibiscus print shorts which were very skimpy and showed all my legs almost right up to my bottom – and the black dress he bought me for the “Miss Anondale” dance which presented my small breasts like they were the centrepiece of my body.

I guess he thought whatever happened, I had him there to protect me from any prying eyes, well at least ones that he hadn’t given permission to.

At the time my older brother Jim, now a lad of sixteen going on seventeen, was at technical college in Rockhampton and there was this one kid he became really friendly with who he would bring back down with him over weekends.

Brad, only seventeen, was taller than Dad. Yes, only seventeen, and taller than Dad. What he was not, was as physically imposing or strong looking. It took a lot to achieve that. But fair in colour and modest in build, he was pretty handsome. Fresh-faced in a blokey sort of way, he had wavy, longish dark blonde hair, and his biggest flaw was that he had this squashed-in nose. It came, I learnt later, from playing footy – rugby league.

His nose looked like it had been tackled into his face, and made his face always look a little “out of focus”. Somehow it managed even to “squash” his giant height. On the other hand, the asphyxiated nostrils gave to a certain generosity in his surprised-looking blue eyes.

Lips, yes the lips. Brad had these slight yet generous lips that gave me an instant belief in him, and soon, instead of just Jim’s friend, he became my friend. In fact, more often than not, he started to come over just to visit me.

Dad and Mum must have known about the relationship, or figured it out, because they often saw us together. They never said anything, well, not until later. The truth was the friendship between Brad and I was perfectly innocent. All we ever did was kiss and hug and kiss some more. But it never got further than that.

Until Dad interceded.

Dad had obviously put two and two together, but on the positive front, and to my surprise, there was no anger, no questioning, no jealousy, and it was like he had smiled on Brad, deciding he was the one.

What I did not realise was what was going on in that twisted mind of his. Dad had obviously escalated everything in his head, because one night, late at night, when I had stayed up with Brad, after Brad had gone to bed, Dad called me into his and Mum’s bedroom.

It was the weirdest moment of my life, even weirder, I would say, than the night I was investigated with a torch between my legs on the kitchen table. It definitely ran close. In the event, I was wearing a short skirt and while Mum quietly slept on the one side of the bed, both of them beneath their royal veil, Dad told me to come and stand at his side of the bed.

He looked me in the eyes, jutting the gap in his front teeth with his tongue, and with full confidence, perhaps I should say the usual confidence, told me to open my legs.

Confused, standing there, I shivered but did as he ordered. Then he leaned down with his head and looked up my skirt, but like a doctor or a forensic scientist, and with his one hand he pulled my knickers aside. I stood there, blinking, unsure what to expect, wondering why he wanted to do something now – with Mum right there on the other side of the bed.

A moment later he had a finger in me, right up my vagina. He was pushing something up me. It felt small like a little round tablet, and then suddenly it went fizzy.

A second or two later, like a backstreet abortionist he pulled his hand and eyes away from under my skirt, and said: ‘That’s for you and Brad, so you don’t get pregnant.’

I have never investigated it, but to this day I still don’t know what Dad shoved up me. I can only suspect it was some kind of spermicide.

My mind was racing and whirring at a million miles per hour and I didn’t quite know what to do – what Dad expected me to do. But as I walked out of Mum and Dad’s royal bedroom it slowly started to sink in that this is what Dad wanted for me: he was giving me permission to have sex with Brad.

In an unsure, spinning-head sort of way, I felt thrilled and elated. Dad was finally opening the curtain to something real for me. He was giving me permission to become a woman. A real woman. I was fifteen – still not sixteen – and he obviously seemed to think the time – and the fella – was right.

I went to Brad, where he was sleeping in a room with my brother, and led him, all six foot and four or five inches of him, into my bedroom, and there for the first time I had sex with another male. While my sister slept soundly in the bed next to mine.

I suppose in any normal household that would have been my first real sexual encounter. Brad never asked and I never said anything. Officially now, I suppose, I was no longer a virgin.

Unlike with Dad, I really did grow up that night.
I had a boyfriend now. A real boyfriend. We became entwined, looking with the same eyes into a similar future, both of us sure... and a little unsure. Much more importantly in the weeks ahead, as our relationship grew, so the more I did not want Dad near me.

This isn’t to say that he didn’t stop
wanting
me, or to
have his way
with me, as they put it in some of the books I read – but more and more now, in my eyes, he was becoming just plain old Dad, definitely not “my boyfriend”, not “my lover”, not even “my mentor”. I was beginning to see it clearer than ever now. What he had been doing was worse than perverted. It was just plain bloody wrong.

As far as I was concerned my loyalty belonged to Brad. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised, this caused problems between Dad and me. He was getting cranky and impatient because he wasn’t getting what he wanted. Threats of sending me away to boarding school or a “girls home” began at this time.

It still haunts in the mind the way he “gave me away” that night. Like a horse he owned. Like a cow at a showground. Happy as I was with Brad, Dad was still somehow managing to get in the way. I just wanted to be a normal teenager, just a normal young girl, free to live and love and breathe. But somehow I was still chained to Dad’s clunking shackles.

It came to a head one night when he asked me to go with him to visit his mum, my Grandma Glad. We drove silently together to Grandma’s house, which was only about ten minutes away, on the other side of Perenjora Dam.

What stands out, is that Grandma Glad looked totally surprised to see us. Normally we would drop by in the day or always call first. Nevertheless, on this night, it was obvious Dad had arrived without calling first. Once Grandma had gotten over her surprise, we stayed for a while and Dad nattered with her and did whatever it was he told me he had to go out there for. And then we left again.

It seemed particularly dark on the way back and on top of that Dad took one of the many sidetracks he knew well from his timber cutting. On one of these tracks he stopped the car and offered me the keys. Even at my age, fifteen, and in my relationship with a fella Dad had given his approval to, I knew what that meant.

He wanted to sit beside me, and while he watched me drive he wanted to put his fingers inside me. He was still doing that. The only difference now was that I was no longer sitting on his lap.

What he was asking was the last thing I wanted to do. The very, very last. Not only was the road dark and dusty, so was my mind. Everything in there was like a storm full of windswept dirt.

I shook my head but Dad insisted. He started pouring out eyes to me like he was astounded, disappointed, that knew I loved to drive. That knew I would do anything to drive. He was considering me like a wise father who knew I was only defying my own best interests. I still said no. He kept insisting, now pricking those “seeing” bird-eyes into me, maybe more honestly now, like not only was I defying my own best interests but his as well.

Eventually, I relented. I had to. Dad smiled, a thin, curled worm, and walked around the car. I shifted over into the driver’s seat.

I started the car and the first thing he did, naturally enough – it was like a cow in season to a worked up bull – was put his hand under my dress. I pushed his hand away. He put his hand back again, and again I pushed it away. I looked to my side and saw the bull, nostrils snorting, lips dry and stiff, tongue sitting against front teeth ready to charge. The hand came back, and affirmatively, almost aggressively. I shouted that most disallowed of all words: No.

The bull bucked and then kicked. That is to say, Dad freaked. He actually freaked so much that he leaned over and took me by the neck and started throttling me. Just like we had seen him do to Mum with the telephone cord. Only this time he was throttling me with his tough, bare hands. His eyes were lit with blue-white heat and everything in my head and in the car was shaking and smouldering.

‘You know I could strangle you and throw your body in the creek and no one would ever know!’ He stared at me like he was capable of anything
.
Anything
.

‘I don’t care. I don’t care.’ Eyes wet and burning, I stared back at him. ‘Do what you like. I don’t care if I die!’ The words squeezed from my throat and the reality was, right then, I really didn’t give a damn. For the first time in my life I really didn’t care. He could do what he wanted with me. The only thing I knew was it was over. I wanted it to be over. And I didn’t care one iota if I died in the process. At that point in my life I was willing to die. I was trying to be independent, my own person, and if he didn’t like it he could kill me.

I don’t know what it was Dad saw in me then. What he saw in the outrage of my wet eyes; I really don’t know, but as I struggled for my last dying breaths before I passed out, suddenly he released his grip on my neck and sat back in his seat.

He breathed out heavily, a bull confused and deflated, like all the wind had been taken out of him. He turned away from me, to the darkness outside, sitting there, despite his height, crinkled looking and dispirited. Finally he half turned back to me and mumbled something about starting the car.

Coughing, my neck shrieking in pain, I turned away from him like I did not ever want to see him again, did not ever want to be duped by his sorrow and dejection. I started the car without a single word further – from him or me.

My throat was steaming, my head was stormy, my hair felt stiff, still so full of muck and dark cloud. The car took off, and although I was sitting there with him I kept having this flash of somehow driving all by myself, in isolated safety, aware he would not dare come near me. And yet still I wanted to die.

In the end, we got home safely that night, safer in many ways than I had been in my entire life, and in many ways blessed, blessed Dad decided not to strangle me as he had said he so easily could on that dark road back from Grandma’s...

Unfortunately this was no Jean Plaidy or Victoria Holt tale, because there was still more to come, lots, lots more.

If there was one thing I had achieved with Dad that night in the car
, it was an end to any sexual relationship between us. Not that he didn’t try again, he did. But by now I had become forceful, and I was saying that word NO with power and confidence. It was rattling him, it was shaking the whole house. Our world was changing.

And yet still Dad would continue his advances. A jilted father? A jilted lover? The last I can remember was him coming into my bedroom one night, turning me onto my back and straddling me. ‘No!’ I yelled at him. ‘No!’

In the dark night I shouted it into his face in that assured way I was becoming used to. It rose from my gut and bellowed through my throat. He reared back like a horse and grabbed me with all his strength in his rough hands and squeezed my brittle shoulders. Then he shook me and shook me and shook me some more.

But in the end he trotted out of the room, empty-handed.

The next day my neck was in such agony that even he could see I needed help. He drove me to the doctor and told the physician it had happened while riding with me on his motorbike. He had suddenly jerked the bike to avoid something on the road, and my head had lurched forwards. In front of the doctor, I did not have it in me to defy Dad. I listened in silence, nodded, and let Dad have his lie.

On some indefinable level in my head, he had the decency to take me to a professional person for help and I appreciated that. By doing so he had made amends and a connection on that mysteriously close father-daughter level had somewhat been re-established.

But it was over now, the sex and abuse was all over now. Or was it? Can it ever be? Like my sore neck, he would live in my head, daily, nightly, weekly, forever, and at this time he would still loom large. So very, very large. The things he had done and their effect would carry over into my everyday life. Into every second of my life.

The things he did – the things he and Mum did.

While Mum and Marge had been away around this time, they were back now, and I was feeling generally contented. But Mum, seeing my close relationship with my boyfriend, Brad, the steadiness of it, the sheer fun and enjoyment of it, had other ideas.

One day when I was not around, she made a point of giving Brad some clues about my past. About my relationship with Dad. About why I may even have had a sore neck. She did it like it was her duty as a mother to do so, to let her daughter’s boyfriend, perhaps a future son-in-law know I may not be all that met the eye. That maybe I belonged to someone else and he should watch it. He should at any rate be aware of it.

I learnt about what Mum had told him on a weekend not long after she had spilled all these sordid, so-called family beans. We were sitting on the shores of the Nebo River together, doing the things we used to do when we were alone: fishing in Dad’s tinnie, swimming and watching the birds, talking about other people and the future, and, well, smooching, yes, lots and lots of smooching.

Sitting there like that, Brad turned to me and suddenly became very serious. So serious I thought his tackled-in face was going to fracture.

His voice was pinching through that squashed nose: ‘Why didn’t you tell me, Deb? About your dad? How could you not say anything?’

‘What! I don’t know what you’re on about,’ I replied in a small voice.

His nose began to flare, becoming braver. ‘Don’t bullshit me, Deb. I know all about it. I know about you. You let your dad touch you. You let your father... fuck you.’ The noise in his nose was like an off-key saxophone.

I was shocked. I felt my face caving inwards. It was like a hurricane had blown right through me. I felt my breasts literally cowering. My neck was crimping into my shoulders and still somehow I managed to find faltering words: ‘How... would you know anything?’

‘Your Mum told me. She showed me everything. All the papers from the court case.’

Game over! I knew it was over. Yes, thank you, Mum. Thank you very much indeed. From your cold, never-there bosom, you had yet again allowed my entire world to disintegrate around me. And yet really, I knew somewhere, somewhere deep down in me, it was really, ‘Yes, Dad.
Yes, Dad
.
Thank you very much, Dad. Once again you have destroyed my world.’

I was at a loss. I could only look down, into the brown of the snake river.

And then he said something that would hurt more than anything else. Even worse maybe than Dad’s abuse.

‘No wonder you were so easy.’

I sat there like I had taken a police bullet in the stomach. Like I had been caught on the run like a violent criminal. I felt so dirty, unclean, like a slut. Like my life was prostitution. Like yet again I was the guilty one. Everything was my fault. I recalled Dad sticking that pill up me and thought how easily I had allowed him to do it. How excited I had become by it.

And yet, and yet... with my new strength, with my renewed belief in myself, I had the sense of mind to feel totally disappointed in Brad too. Tearing with my eyes into his chest, I collected myself and saw that in this young man, my ever so tall and now shredded friend, there was yet an immature boy, not the strong guy I had come to believe in, the one I thought would stick by me no matter what.

I saw in his youth, in that naive squashed nose of his, that, like Dad said, he was yet another of those who would never “get it”. Only he would never get it on the levels I wanted him to get it, the levels that were more than Dad’s twisted mind set the rules upon. Levels that existed on the simple plains of civilised human morality and decency.

And so, in the end, in the upshot, sitting there crying and dismayed on the banks of the river, it was me who had to soothe him. To be the one to do the comforting. I did it in a way I did not expect it to come out: by confessing. By spilling all those poisoned family worms from my mouth.

I faced up to the hardening skin of my young lover, and told him how it was true, it was all true, and then pleaded to him to forgive me and try to understand. It wasn’t my fault. If he could just understand, not every bit of it.

I told him how I hated my father now. Hated him in a way that it was hard even for Brad to breathe in. But I think that did it, more than anything that did it, seeing that I could hate another man so much – the man I was meant to have made love to.

Suddenly he saw, or was willing to believe, I didn’t want any more of “that stuff”. It belonged to another universe. Another girl who wasn’t me. He accepted we were a couple. Dad, my father, my abuser, my mentor, my lover, my friend, was over. Completely done! I hated the man with a passion.

It restored faith. It reconnected us, and we remained close, Brad and me, boyfriend and girlfriend, real young lovers after that, but I always knew from then, from that time of accusation and confession, there was something missing.

It would end with Mum on the run again. She needed help and Brad was the one who could supply it. On this occasion it was so bad, apparently, she was even taking me along.

Yes, despicable, despised me. I was over the moon excited, being included in Mum’s plans with Marge and Sam, and we were all, all of us together running away from that man, her husband, our father.