Sawdust (16 page)

What I really needed was love and stability and some kind of emotional anchor.
I wanted, I suppose like any girl my age, to be seen and noticed and desired. But I also wanted to be desired for what I was, for what I now thought I was: an empathetic young person with some innate wisdom and sensibility. And the fantastic thing was Mr Doherty saw all of that. Saw the young woman in me. The line of beauty that stretched from the tip of my head down to the soft flesh beneath my toenails. Who saw the unsure, raw wisdom in my breast.

In retrospect, I now realise he probably saw even much more than I could have ever thought he saw. Also heard more. When he very first laid eyes on me in his classroom he would have known things about me, known I was the “problem girl” from Perenjora Dam with more bad experiences than you could chuck a half broken house at. He probably would have been told, or in some way advised, about the abuse, about the almost reformatory-strict upbringing of my parents mixed in with all the drinking and merriment and running away craziness.

He would, anyway, have been able to see it all over my face. In the way my hair fell so thick and shamelessly to my shoulders, like a hussy, like a girl lusty. In need.

And yet... he probably was the kindest, most caring man I had ever met. I already used that word gentle, yes, several times, but he was the most gentle too. He was the father, the older brother, the lover, the mother I needed all my life. I think it was the hands, so much in the long, tender hands, like Aunty Bev.

Unlike other men, well the two tall ones I had known until then, Dad and the other one, Brad a mere boy, Luke Doherty was never rough; it was never just about him. He was the first man who bent between my legs – not to shove it in like a tent peg and then run off like a satisfied boy scout – but who put his mouth there to pleasure me. Who did not always end our nights together with sex, who was happy to lie with me in his arms, happy only that I was happy. Although I never did, I always felt that I could cry with joy when I was with him.

Okay, so we had to be secretive about it. I understood secrets, they were part of my life. It was worth the risk, worth all the rainless Gladstone dirt I ever kicked, played on and fell over. It was worth the sky.

Luke… Luke Doherty enabled me to trust in others; gave me the possibility of hopefulness, of pleasantness and yearning in the flesh, gave me a kind of optimism with beams of sunshine that shone through my cloggy pores. With him, I could almost see it, that light...

Two whole months, that’s how long it lasted. That’s all. And yet it seemed... forever.

What I do remember almost as much from school at that time, was our middle-aged geography teacher, Mr Bloom. One day, trying to be comforting, trying to be nice to me, he placed an arm around my shoulders. It was in front of the whole class. Something in me froze and I peed myself.

Yes, at fifteen, when Mr Bloom, out of the kindness of his heart, put his arms around me, I peed myself. I caught such a fright at what he was doing, I went to ice and lost my bearings. For a moment I was not sure what he was on about, what he was going to do to me. My mind lurched, spun, tripped over, and I weed down my legs, seeing black clouds open like thunder in my head.

It became clear to me: it was different when Mr Doherty did the same. It sparked a whole set of other connections in my head. Signals unrelated to my past, unrelated to my going from one lap to another, unrelated to graphic pictures shown to me in lurid magazines.

When Mr Doherty touched me, the memories were warm like winter fire. I loved the intimacy. And even though it was wrong, all plain wrong, I never freaked out like I did when a simple, concerned man like Mr Bloom tried to sincerely comfort me. Then I became a mess: it told me I was still a dark and sodden clutter of disorder.

Enter Chris Pyke.

Because of the secret nature of our relationship – mine and Luke Doherty’s – I still hung around with the boys and girls I met at school. And while Luke lived out his teacher life for the most part separately, I lived my maturing schoolgirl life with my school friends. The result was we both often did different things at the same time, met different people, hung in different crowds.

One of the people I met during this time was this other post-school bloke, Chris Pyke, another of the older lads who had the girls’ tongues sweating.

In the blur of Mum’s comings and goings from our home at Perenjora Dam, there was a night I recall that was one of those community barn dances. Dad was with us, and as usual with shotgun like precision he was watching over our every move. But at one point I went – or shall I say, was allowed to go – with a couple of girlfriends to the toilet. At the stairwell next to the toilet, was standing, or rather casually leaning, this longhaired, surfie looking, sought-after young guy. This was Chris Pyke.

I cannot tell a lie, seeing him leaning so confidently there, I could hear not just
my
heart beat but
all
the girls’. And then behind me, I heard a voice call out, ‘Hey, spunk bubble.’ I felt tingles going up my spine. All of us girls turned around, of course, each of us hoping. But my heart started to rush and then miss a whole stack of beats when I realised that voice was meant for me.

I waved and he nodded back in his smiley, charming way. Throat banging in my forehead, for the time being that was the end of that. But it was the spark that would lead to other things, other meetings. Dates.

I had actually first met Chris when I was about nine, when Dad, as always ready with a hand, helped the Pyke family out with a place to stay until they could rent a home of their own. I also went to primary school with his sister and brothers. Small world.

Totally unknowing of my relationship with my teacher, yet a friend of Luke Doherty at the time, after that barn dance Chris began to call me at home and ask me out. Obviously, I was never allowed to go but occasionally he turned up to see me, was allowed to visit, and we became friendly. My chest breathed with a flutter.

One night in Burrum Sound, Luke Doherty still secretly an intimate part of me, Chris Pyke called and asked if I wanted to go with him and a couple of friends to the drive-in. Knowing the answer from Mum, I almost felt like only pretending I had gone to ask her and then going back to the phone to tell him the only answer it could be. Only, on this occasion, I decided to take my chances, and Mum,
Mum
, I could not believe it, said yes. For some reason, this time it was OK.

I was beside myself. I was going out to the drive-in with Chris Pyke – after Mr Doherty, probably the most sought after fella in Burrum. I didn’t give poor Mr Doherty a second thought.

Chris picked me up that Saturday night, and in the street, as though waiting in his car for me to come out, was Luke Doherty. Yes, Mr Doherty, my lover, my teacher, my bent guide, was parked there, car humming, just sitting there and waiting for me.

He called out, I could see, a little dismayed as he saw me and Chris leaving the house. He asked what was happening. Chris, a man with an apprenticeship and almost a trade already, called back firmly and matter-of-factly, ‘Going to the drive-in, mate. Do you want to come?’

‘Naaah, it’s OK, mate,’ Mr Doherty intoned. ‘You young ones have fun.’

I tried to wave at Luke Doherty, to smile courteously, but he revved his car, turned the wheel boyishly, and was gone. It was the end of two of the most wonderful months in my life. How much could they have meant to my teacher, who I saw then as my life coach and priest, as well as my educator, I don’t know.

I can only say I must have meant something to him, because we remained friendly while we still lived in the same area. I knew, at a gut level, Luke was who he was, even though he must have been aware that he was taking advantage of his position. Yet, at that earnest primal level, I craved the security of real love.

My beloved teacher and I stayed in contact after that, for many years. After all, he was also a mate of my new mate, Chris Pyke.

Now it was over to Chris Pyke, the man who would steal my heart, in a sense steal, because over the years, after the good times, I had to fight to get it back. To struggle and claw, and yes, even grow up some more.

They always seemed to have long wavy hair,
and Chris, when I met him, was no different. Only with that sixties middle parting, it made him look a bit like Jim Morrison from The Doors. But even more so than Jim Morrison, he had small penetrating hazel eyes that looked like they were undressing not just your clothes but your flesh. The brows that stood above the eyes were so strong and curved it was like they were “seeing” – like an owl. I guess those eyes were his temples – that hid within them his own hard upbringing.

Chris, too, had had it tough, witnessing at an early age the attempted hanging suicide of his father. He also, as I would discover, had his own bouts of depression, his own ongoing moods. Yes, those moods...

But in the beginning it was fun. It was exciting being with Chris. From the next door city of Gladstone, he was a guy of his times – with his open-neck shirt, tightly-hung surfie leather necklace, early seventies droop moustache, and tiny goatee beneath a kind and full bottom lip.

His lips. They were bowed and sorrowful and weighted with unknown bitterness, but they could be warm, and more important than anything, they were honest. At least in the beginning I thought they were.

It was good to be around Chris and his friends, and the best part was our relationship could be open. There were no secrets. Dad did not really say whether he approved or disapproved but by now he knew I was well out of his clutches and Mum was only too happy to have someone take me safely out of her sight of a weekend.

The trouble was I was still in Year Eleven. It was a big year, Year Eleven. Probably bigger than most kids would want to shoulder even when they were much older. But it was also filled, however wrongfully and darkly, with rounded corners of softness and radiance. And now with Chris, I saw this illumination burning ahead.

The important thing was I felt like I was beginning to have faith in my own ability, my own sense of decision-making, my own maturing outlook on life, and I was beginning to make plans. I had crossed a mountain, or felt like I had crossed a mountain, and in the road on the other side I finally saw straightness and direction.

I wanted to finish school. Not only that, I already knew I wanted to become a nurse or something closely related. Maybe a pre-school teacher? Remember Mum’s Mum had a little girl, my Auntie Beatrice, and I tried to lift her out of the cot? I loved children. I absolutely adored them.

Whatever, even if it wasn’t nursing or caring for the little ones, by finishing school I knew, as they all told me, especially Mr Dreamboat Doherty himself, a far bigger and better world would open to me.

Mum had other plans
.

There was a young couple who ran a very wealthy Appaloosa stud farm in the area, at Rodds Bay, and Mum organised that I would go and stay over there in my school holidays and on the odd weekend -- to look after their infant son and do other domestic chores while they went about their business.

Nigel and Alysha Godbolt, the owners of the farm, may not realise it, not even to this day, but as it turned out, they had one of the most positive effects on my life out of anybody. Young and already wealthy as they were, rather than braggers and snobby there was something about them that was “together”.

I loved being around them. Unlike my family, it was like they did not have to fight to breathe. There were no battles for the oxygen around them. They lived and inhaled easily and were phenomenally at home and loving within their own little family unit. To begin with, this included their two-year-old son, Jay, but later came a second boy, Eli.

Their stud farm ran, literally, for thousands upon thousands of acres, and just after Year Eleven, right at the very end of the Christmas school holidays, something happened that would tie me more closely to the Godbolts and their immense stud farm than I could have ever thought.

It was about the third last day of the holidays and I was due to go home and prepare to go back to school – happy I had only a year to go to finish my Senior. Then, of course, it would be onwards and outwards to who knows where? Nursing, yes, nursing or pre-school teaching were still definitely in my sights.

As I packed my bags and mentally prepared for my final onslaught at school, outside the house, through the Godbolts’ large lounge windows, I saw this small sky-blue car. It was Mum’s. She was at the house a day early.

‘What’s she doing here already? She’s only meant to pick me up tomorrow,’ I said to Alysha Godbolt.

‘What do you mean?’ Alysha’s eyes flicked and she shook her short, mousey brunette hair. ‘Mum’s just dropped off your clothes.’ I must have looked at her like a brainless white rat shaking with an experimentally injected head of big, bushy brown hair, because Alysha stared back at me like I was some kind of deformed rodent. ‘Don’t you know this is your new job? You’re working for me now, silly.’

I felt my head go cold and shrink, or is that sink? Sink and shrink. My stomach, too. My gut drew inwards like it had been kicked in fury. It was all news to me. I couldn’t comprehend. It was like someone talking behind my back in another language and I was only slowly beginning to figure the not so kind truth of what they were saying about me.

The sickly translation, it turned out, was Mum had made a life-changing decision for me. All on her own, without a scrap of consultation, she had decided my future. She had decided I was not going back to school – ever. I was now to be a full-time, live-in nanny to the Godbolts.

Staring across into the blameless, deer-like eyes that were Alysha’s, I could tell Mum had not told her the truth either – that I had absolutely not in any way been conferred with in this life decision. I was hearing it now, as I was living it, in the white, blinking horror of the moment. I felt like the tip of a sharp sword was piercing through my neck.

‘You really didn’t know…’ Alysha’s eyes looked like they were genuinely drinking in the revulsion of it.

‘No.’ I burst out crying. ‘No.’

‘Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness.’ She was suddenly mumbling and holding me around the shoulders.

Little white rat with wild bushy hair, I looked at her thinking what’s going to happen to me now, but understanding only too well. And it was like Alysha knew in that timid look of mine, I had caved, I had already given in to those greater elements that stepped everywhere into my life and stood between me and that massive force out there. Alysha, slim but muscular in a Roman boy way, walked away like her heart would crack if she had to make any decisions for me in that moment in time.

Like everything in my life so far, I took it on the jaw. I cried and protested in my head, but there was no way I was going back to Mum. Dad? That wasn’t even a question. So I decided I had to do what I always did in life, I immediately set to making my new job with the Godbolts as good as it could be. In effect, once again, even if with buckling knees, I stood up and called on faith. This time it was in the future.

The positive part, and I have to admit this was an attraction better than school, I lived just outside the main house, in “my own rooms” – which in this case was a caravan, a small caravan that was warm and comfortable and to me, even if it did leak in the occasional rainstorm, had more than enough space. Room. I did not need much at that time in my life. A bed, a dressing table, that was about it.

On the down side, there was no electricity, but I could read to my heart’s content by candlelight. Actually, it was amazing to me how I could live in a big house with my parents with acres and acres of empty property around us, and could feel like I was being suffocated. Whereas here, at the Godbolts, I was in a little caravan with a single room and burning candles all around me and it felt like I was living in acres of fresh air.

That was the thing, the air around the Godbolts was always positive. Always guiding. Even when firm, their breath was always pointed in a definite direction. I liked that. I liked the security of it.

Nigel Godbolt, the man of the house, the husband, may have been nerdy to the extreme, with his binocular-thick glasses that were so dense they were like coke bottles, but with his “goggles” sitting astride his enormous Roman nose, he cared. He and Alysha wanted to see me prosper. They wanted more for me than just earn my keep and stagnate. More for me than my own parents.

In fact it was them, Nigel and Alysha, who I would sit down with at the dinner table of a night and who would ask me as naturally as any real parent might, what I thought I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I don’t ever remember Mum or Dad doing that. I can’t even remember them asking what I thought my interests were or what excited or attracted me at any one time.

The Godbolts, on the other hand, would even offer suggestions, ideas that were plausible and possible. From day one, seeing my reaction to being summarily dumped there, it was like there was an implicit understanding that I was not going to be their nanny forever.

Unlike my parents who wanted to plant me in the dry Gladstone ground and were satisfied to leave me searching in the dirty soil down there, rooted only to some vague concept of family and whatever weird and whacky ideas occurred to them, the Godbolts wanted to see me grow. They wanted to see the sun flicker in me. They wanted me to make up my own mind.

The Godbolts only had one rule about “my rooms”: Chris, my boyfriend, could visit whenever he wanted – which in its own way was like a big satisfying breath of fresh air – but he could not sleep over. Not under any circumstances.

I heartily agreed and welcomed the rule.