Sawdust (24 page)

You make the best of things. You try to sort out the worst.
I have done my best to scrape away the past, to bury it in the ground at my feet, but eventually, in some way, at some time, it comes back and grabs you like spikes at the ankles.

I made a point of teaching each one of my children three things: 1.) Your body is your body and no one else has a right to touch it without your consent.

2.) Always stand up for yourself. It doesn’t matter how big they are: Stand up to em. As I had learnt, it frightens them away. Even the big ones.

And finally, 3.) I taught them, if there is ever anything bothering you, tell me, and tried to make them feel safe and comfortable enough to do so.

But knowing children, in case they didn’t feel comfortable telling me, I taught them this: If you can’t come to me, that’s fine, but make sure you go and speak to someone – an adult person. Someone you think you can trust. And keep talking until you have been heard. If you are not satisfied with the response, choose another adult person until you feel you have been understood.

I made sure my bedroom door was always open to them.

With this background, Sarah, nine, came home from school camp one day and told me that one of the kids in her class was very upset.

‘Something very terrible is happening to her, Mum. Something to do with her stepfather.’

I stared down at her, every fibre in my being knowing, already wriggling. ‘Yes...’

‘Everyone knows, Mum... but nobody will say anything.’

Oh my God, I thought. Oh my God, here we go.

‘He’s probably hurting her in some way, Sarah, and she just doesn’t know how to deal with it.’ I tried to talk in a way sufficiently responsive but uncommitted enough for the subject to be dismissed and forgotten about.

She stared back at me. ‘How would you know that, Mum?’ Just like that – a child’s adult-eye to a mother’s dishonest eye. ‘How would you know that, Mum?’

‘I just know, sweetheart. I know.’

‘Well, you tell me how you know, Mum. I want to know how you know.’

She wasn’t letting me off the hook. Not in any way. It was obvious to me she knew more than she was letting on, in fact knew, at the least, a lot more than I thought she knew about that awful word “hurting”.

But I did not want to continue that conversation, not at that time. Not with Sarah so young and innocent. I still felt too ashamed. Was too afraid that my own dark ghosts, my own lies and deceptions and hurts would come bumbling from my lips and I would not be able to control what I said.

I was having counselling at the time, but there was one thing I still did not want, even though the counsellor gave me “the permission and the power” to confess it, was for my children to know.

I could stand up to my father, the culprit, the beast, “the murderer”, but the wounds were still too raw to tell my children. Still too close to the veins to wipe away the veneer of innocence and joy when they greeted their tall as a house, loving and jokey Grandad – their “Grandy”, as they affectionately called him.

The grandfather they looked up to with the awe of puppies.

I tried, strategically, feigning disinterest, to leave it more or less at that, explaining to Sarah a little further what I thought she already knew, that that girl’s stepfather was hurting his stepdaughter by touching her without having the permission I always warned about. But exactly how he was touching her was not for me to say.

She gazed at me sceptically, and I felt my heart diving. I had to tell her something more. It was also important, I could see it in her bloating face, that I
did
something. Did something rather than just listen and feel sorry and turn my cheek.

She was eyeing me with those blue, doe-like eyes of hers, and they were insistent, not letting go. Eventually I told her, yes, I would do something and resolved at that moment that I would. I would phone the police –
the police
– because, I had to be honest with her, her school friend was obviously feeling so much pain she felt compelled to tell her mates about it.

My decision, my decisiveness, made Sarah happy. Her eyes finally let go of mine, seeing I was doing something about it, actually willing to stand in the road for someone else.

That same day, I called the local police station, albeit anonymously, and was put through to the Protective Behaviour Unit. I told them what I had heard from my daughter, and, in the end, in the weeks ahead, that family was successfully investigated. That is to say, The Devil, the Dark Perpetrator within had been brought into the daylight, and there was some justice done. The stepfather was brought to heel, made to confess, and desist. One hopes forever.

But Sarah never let up. This idea of “hurting” and “being hurt” by being “touched” was growing in her mind. I think too, even at her young age, she was seeing in my own bulging lips that they were thick with shame, guilt, there was something wrong, something I was hiding.

Sarah was intuitive for her age – there was just nothing I could do about it. And over the next days, weeks, months, she kept at me, kept at me as badly as any obsessive child over a toy they desperately wanted. She kept asking about “hurting” and “touching”, and how I knew so much about it.

One day, it must have been as long as a year later, Sarah, ten then, Ruth, eight, I decided I had had enough of the questions. It was time to speak. I knew the truth, at least some of it, a small quantity of it, had to come out. Dean, my son, was still far too young, so I sat my two daughters down on a kitchen bench and told them as simply as I could, my story.

‘When I was a little girl,’ I told them, seeing them peering up at me from their miniature two-seater wooden bench, ‘I was touched by someone... in the wrong way. You know, in that way I said to be careful of. In my private parts. Like that girl at your school.’

‘By who?’ Sarah’s response, in her typical child-adult way was like an exclamation mark I couldn’t get around.

I shook my head. ‘That, I am afraid, I can’t tell you.’

It hit me like a massive rock, just how hard it was to tell anyone, to tell my children something that might crush them, that would definitely change their world, which would destroy the mystery and joy in it. How could a simple truth be so difficult – that the person responsible was the lovable, affable, always ready with a joke creature whose head reached so high into the air at times it looked like it actually touched the sun.

‘Tell us, Mum. You have to!’ It was Sarah, coaxing.

I could see the concern, something motherly in her, something protective and at the same time sharp and already mature and judgemental abiding in her. Next to her, I saw Ruth, eight, her long flowing hair like a doll’s, her still feline greenish-blue eyes interested but not as interested, her eyes merely following her older sister but not caring in the same way.

All I knew at that time was that I did not want to reveal the truth to them – I did not want to devastate, did not want to shatter that “Father Christmas/Tooth Fairy” illusion for either of them. I did not want them to see their grandad – their loving “Grandy” – for what he was, a monster. Not yet. Not yet.

‘The only thing I can say,’ I eventually struggled, ‘is that you are safe... safe from the person. I can assure you... you will always be safe from that person.’

It is so difficult this thing – to shatter illusions. To shatter a child’s illusions about people they cherish and love. It is even more difficult when the person is a relative, is a part of their skin and blood. A part of the same seed.

As with all the exotic lies we tell in order to keep our children happy, I wanted my children to be protected from the real world, from the real beasts in their family tree for as long as possible. I looked especially at my tough little interrogator, Sarah.

‘Sweetheart,’ I said, ‘all you need to know is that I’m not hurt anymore. I’m fine now. So, there’s nothing to worry about. Everything is okay.’

She and her younger sister trundled off then, into the garden to play, perhaps even, by the looks of their body language, to ask questions between themselves. And in fact that is probably just what happened – because it was obvious Sarah was not satisfied with my explanations or my reasoning. In the weeks and months that followed, she still never let up, still kept asking, ‘Who did this thing to you, Mum?’

She would ask at bath-times or bedtimes or in those quiet moments when I thought I was safe. ‘Why did they do it to you, Mum?’

Shaking my head, I would shush her quiet, but eventually in her grown up-child way she would continue by saying, ‘My mum and dad would have protected me.’ And then she would give a wry smile. Even at her age, a wryness on the lips.

Yes, that hurt. Really, really hurt.
Her mum and dad would have protected her
.
They would have, and they did. But what about mine? It could have been so easy to fall into self-sorrow then. Into that feeling of woe is me. It could have been so easy to show her my sobbing face and say, yes, yes, it is true, it is absolutely true, and have her feel sorry for me.

But I did not want that. If the day came that I eventually told her, told all my children, I wanted them to understand, I wanted them to be able to reason, I also wanted them to know I was a person in my own right now, that I was no longer that shy, hurt, guilty little girl they had to feel sorry for. I wanted them to know I could stand up on my own two feet – no matter what happened in the past.

That time of telling, that time of shattering illusions, would come. Yes, it would, I could see it in those moments. It is impossible to turn off the interrogative tap of an enquiring child. Especially one like Sarah.

What I did not want is the story of my growing up, of their family tree, so dark and black, to burgeon and explode on them through other means, other people – and then I would have lost control of my own story.

The only thing in my favour was that, as things stood, no one else in the family wanted to admit the past. No one. I could wait to release it.

I know I should have loathed the sound of trains or maybe even trains themselves,
but a whole couple of years later, I remember it distinctly, there we were sitting on a train going somewhere, and bored with looking out of the window into other people’s yards like others used to do to us, Sarah, a twelve-year-old now, started asking her questions again, trying to figure out her game of Family Cluedo, and she said to me more maturely than ever before: ‘Why didn’t they protect you, Mum? Why didn’t Grandy and Nana protect you from that awful man?’

My lips must have been quivering, the hooting sound of shunting trains rushing back to my head as I lay there with my legs sprawled open and my head back on a mattress, restless, because all I could do was look down at her, and then it was like she saw the light – or was it the darkness? And she said, ‘I know why, Mum. I know. Because it was them. Wasn’t it? It was Grandy and Nana who hurt you.’

I did not know whether to shake or nod or turn my head in shame. I wanted to cry. She knew, Sarah knew, she had worked it out in her own little head, and now she had effectively spilled the beans to my other two children who were listening to every word.

And still I could not say that word “yes”. Much less breathe the full statement of truth, ‘Yes, it was Grandy. Your grandfather. My father!’

It hurt, it hurt too much. I know I probably should not at that time have done this, but I left it in the air, the timing not yet comfortable for me, still managing to leave it dangling in that world of the illusory. Of rattling trains. Of passing cars. I neither confirmed nor denied, knowing inside me that my children were already seeing their grandparents in a different light. Would never feel as comfortable with them again. Were confused about the people they loved. The train rode on, my lips still quiet and fracturing.

Amazingly, it was not until Sarah was nearly fifteen – yes, nearly fifteen, that’s how long I managed to hold off – that I found I had to make a full and truthful confession. Sarah was just too insistent, she never let up, not over all those years; there was always, at some time, the questioning, the judgement, the knowing in her eyes. And all I wanted to do was keep up the façade and maintain that terrible secret which I thought made me such a dirty person. It was not even so much that I wanted to protect their love for their Grandy. It was that feeling of dirt written over my body.

And then finally it came out one day, bumbled like Snow White dressed in black and covered in blood from my lips. First to her and then to the others, telling them the truth, the absolute and God honest truth, well, as far as I could tell it without damaging my children as well.

In any event, no matter how I said it, no matter what I said, it tarnished them all. Grandad was no longer Grandad anymore. Grandy was over. Which was just what I knew would happen. But Sarah, Sarah the eldest and the most inquisitive, took it the hardest.

While the other two, in their way, were more forgiving at the time, more willing to let the darkness of the past reside in the past, Sarah immediately began to hate him, to hate her Grandy for what he did, and not only him but her Nana for doing nothing to protect me.

She hated them both from then on – and with a passion that never receded until the day her Grandy was buried. She hated them in a way that perhaps I should have hated them? But especially him, Grandad, her Grandy, she did not want to be anywhere near him again. The sun had faded from his tall, mythical head, and his strong, music-loving hands were no longer a joy to hold. They were cut and scarred with sin. He had blood – and flesh,
my
flesh – on his hands.

To this day, despite my counselling, despite what I felt was an ever-growing inner strength in me, I do not know why I hid the truth from my children for so long. Or maybe I do, the honest truth is I do know: it was because in some way I wanted us to be a normal family, a family perhaps with warts, a few warts and pimples here and there, but not with the massive corns and carbuncles and stab wounds that were the reality.

I wanted to keep up the damned Father Christmas and Tooth Fairy tales and hide my children from their real world. I suppose, in a sick, bizarre way, I still felt that irretrievable link – like a chain – to my abuser. To my children’s Grandy. It is the deceptive nature of that terrible venom. At the same time as we should be running away, it ties us. That – that is the true abuse. It is not something the next – safe – generation can ever begin to comprehend.

I recently heard in a court series on the ABC, the proposition that “a fear of abuse leads to a learned helplessness”. Maybe. I would say, in my humble opinion, not even a “learned helplessness”, but a kind of acceptance, a tolerance. A way of being. And in the end, as in my case, that fear, that so-called fear was not even fear at all, it was a deep sense of obligation to keep up appearances – the appearance of the “happy family”, the “normal family”.

But I am happy that, in the end, no matter how late, the truth of my family, of my family relations and history, at least came to my children through
my
lips. Even if they could not forgive, especially as in the case of Sarah, I am sure because of my telling her, and the way in which I told her, she did not have to feel sorry for me in a way that I was incurable, an invalid.

I could show her how eventually I fought back and stood up. That woe definitely was not me. And nor should it ever be on her or my other children.

The amazing thing, especially to her, is that, even on my father’s deathbed, each day I went to him, those afternoons I drove from Ipswich to the hospital in Brisbane where he was being treated for his cancer, I fed and comforted him...