For a Girl Read online

  Mary-Rose MacColl is the author of five novels, including In Falling Snow and Swimming Home, as well as a nonfiction book, The Birth Wars.

  This is a true story. Some names and details have been changed to protect privacy.

  First published in 2017

  Copyright © Mary-Rose MacColl 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 76029 523 3

  eISBN 978 1 92557 684 9

  Cover design: Romina Panetta

  I HAVE A PHOTOGRAPH OF a girl of ten. She is standing by the convent pool she swam in every Saturday of that summer, in togs with a striped border I don’t remember owning. She is in the left of the frame and the background is an overexposed blur of water and the shapes of children. Her face is brightly white except for the freckles scattered over her nose and cheeks. Her hair is stuck to her forehead. She is grinning, saying to you, the observer, ‘I am here.’

  Contents

  My body remembers

  PART I: Wandering

  Happy families are all alike

  Byron

  Aye, Dugald

  Heroes

  My teacher and her husband

  Byron tsunami

  Jump-cuts

  My body knows

  101 Grattan Street

  Where the real pain begins

  PART II: Disappearing

  A different skin

  Byron sunrise

  Keeping the secret

  A lifeline

  Byron kindness

  Ordinary men

  Byron shark

  Fear

  Writer Mary-Rose

  Angels

  Bridges

  Otis in the world

  PART III: Returning

  Homeless

  The house of my addled mind

  The sewer in Hope Street

  Care

  I let go

  Byron cows

  The decision I made

  What happens to women

  I’d rather be happy than normal

  Target

  Unresolved grief

  Byron moon

  PART IV: Arriving

  Byron swim

  Rosemary

  Byron goodbye

  April 2016

  Home

  Writer’s note

  My body remembers

  WHEN OUR SON OTIS WAS tiny we lived in the gentle university neighbourhood of St Lucia in Brisbane, in a seventies townhouse with soaring ceilings and a balcony that overlooked a bushland park. A butcherbird perched on our railing and sang most mornings, mournful or joyful, depending more on the listener than the bird. Two frogmouths, mother and baby, spent their days in the tree outside Otis’s bedroom in his first months in the world. Frogmouths are nightjars, related to owls, wise. I thought they could keep him safe.

  On weekends we’d put Otis in his all-terrain stroller and walk along Hawken Drive to the university for gelati from the Pizza Caffe above the Schonell Theatre. One Sunday, when Otis was not quite two, we met up with my husband David’s sister Lisa who was off to London to live. We’d had our gelati and Otis had coated his shirt in chocolate and mango. Now he was running around on the grass.

  When it was time to go home, I called Otis and then, when he didn’t come, chased after him. I picked him up under the arms, his little legs still running through air in the way of busy toddlers. I sat him in his stroller and rolled up his shirt, the gelati now melted and cold on his tummy. I strapped him into his stroller and he screamed.

  At first I thought he was objecting to the restraint and I started to be stern. I wanted Lisa, who’d just finished a PhD in psych, to think well of me, to see me as a mother who set limits. Then I saw I had pinched his belly in the stroller clip. I undid the strap and picked him up and held him. He cried for half an hour. It left a claret-coloured bruise that lasted two weeks.

  When we arrived home, I went upstairs to the bathroom and shut myself in. My right leg was shaking, the long thigh muscle in painful spasm. I slumped against the door to keep myself upright. The shaking spread to my pelvis, belly, left leg. I fell to the floor. Noises came from me, a low moan, a louder cry. My teeth were chattering, making the cries come out in an odd staccato. If it weren’t so terrifying, it might have been funny.

  David knocked on the bathroom door to ask what was wrong. I had been quiet on the way home. I told him to leave me alone. I screamed at him to leave me alone.

  After some time—I don’t know how long—I came out of the bathroom. I had no idea what had happened. The next day, I felt as if I’d run a marathon. Every muscle in my body ached.

  In the weeks that followed, I told myself I’d been upset because I hurt my little boy. Any mother would feel bad about hurting her child. I told David. I told friends. You know what it’s like being a mother? I said. They didn’t quite understand, I could tell. They had felt bad for accidentally hurting their children but not like this.

  When Otis came into my life, I understood abundance. His birth: I have never felt so powerful and exposed and exultant. David was there, my friend Louise. Afterwards I was buoyed by a community of friends and relatives who shared in our joy of new life; even people we hardly knew looked upon us with joy in their own eyes. Otis was perfect and he made me feel perfect. Nothing of the drudgery of the weeks and months that followed could extinguish that light of joy, and whatever I have faced since cannot touch it. In Otis’s first months in the world there was enough joy for a lifetime.

  At the hospital where I gave birth, I heard one midwife call to another that the woman in Room 2, me, was an elderly primip. Elderly is used to describe any woman over thirty-five—the obstetricians who make up these terms being noted for their sensitivity—and primip is short for primipara, from the Latin primus, first, and para, to bring forth. To those midwives, to most people I knew, I was a forty-one-year-old woman giving birth for the first time.

  Gail Sher says that writers, by doubt, enter the way of writing. I wouldn’t have described myself as elderly at forty-one, and I wasn’t primiparous when Otis was about to be born. I had given birth twenty-three years before, to a baby I named Ruth. No one knew. Baby Ruth was a secret because of other secrets, much darker than the birth of an unplanned child in those disco days of the 1980s. When I pinched Otis in the stroller clip, baby Ruth came back, demanding to be grieved, and with her came the secrets I had kept for so long.

  I am by nature a private person. Secrets are different from privacy. They are things you are forced to keep to yourself, by family, friends, by your own shame. Secrets like these come to the surface one day and demand an airing. If you don’t allow them air, you will not go on. They will drag you back down with them. You will die, slowly or quickly.

  If you allow them the air, bring them up into the light, they float away.

  PART Ir />
  Wandering

  Happy families are all alike

  WE ALWAYS HAD CHRISTMAS WITH my mother’s family when I was growing up: her three brothers, their wives and twenty or so kids, along with Mum’s mother, my nana. The menu was chicken and potato salad, followed by watermelon. There were devilled eggs at Tom and Mary’s, brandy flames on the plum pudding at Tony and Jill’s, and no pudding sixpences at ours because Mum worried about the choking hazard.

  I famously danced on the table when I was two, my uncle Tom encouraging me into a frenzy, a whirling dervish, everyone in fits of laughter until, inevitably, I collapsed in tears in a plate of watermelon.

  I was full of beans, Mum said. I look ridiculous in photographs taken in my early years. Mum cut my thick hair straight across at the front in a blunt fringe, forming a right angle on each side. My chubby cheeks pushed my eyes closer together, and Mum told me, many years later, that Nana believed there was something wrong with me mentally—based on the fringe rather than the whirling dervish incident, although the whirling dervish probably didn’t help.

  My oldest cousin, Marg, used to visit our house with Nana. Marg would have been ten when I was two. When they arrived one day, I was in the sandpit wearing nothing but a nappy, using the wedding silver for digging tools. Even Marg knew, she said, when she told me the story years later, that something wasn’t quite right, that the silver wasn’t for digging. I was the third baby; the fourth was on the way. The next day, Nana came back with Marg, bringing with them Nana’s cleaner. No one remarked on this, Marg said. The cleaner sorted out the house while us kids gobbled down the cakes Nana brought from the Shingle Inn cake shop in the city. And then they left.

  Mum used to drive us around in the car on Sundays after Mass and we’d get lost. There was a man at Mass, Joe, who had cerebral palsy, and before we went on the drives Mum would always stop and talk to him. Others, including me, gave Joe a wide berth—spit came out when he talked and he had trouble with words. Mum would seek him out. She’d struggle to understand him, but she’d stay there until they’d had a reasonable conversation. Then she’d wish him well and tell him she’d see him next week.

  On the drives, I think Mum only pretended we were lost. We had a big old Austin called Granny that had belonged to Nana and the back door would sometimes swing open around corners. My two big brothers, Ian and Andrew—one of whom would always reach across and pull the door shut when it flew open and frightened me—were much better at finding the way home than I was. We lived in a spec-built weatherboard house in Chapel Hill and all the roads were dirt, so Granny would fill up with road dust and Mum would lead us in a song she composed called ‘I Wonder How the Dust Gets In’.

  When I was four, my brothers and I were taken away to a children’s home north of Brisbane. I think Mum’s younger brother, our uncle Tony, the doctor, drove us there. He may have found the home. It also might have been Tony who told us Mum needed to have a rest.

  Soon after I arrived at the home I was stared at by a doctor who had a moustache. I’d been told to strip off to my green cottontail underpants to be weighed and he was staring at me. Did they provide us with clothes? I think they did, even the green cottontails. I didn’t like being in cottontails in front of the doctor. I might have bitten him. I still had the fringe so it’s possible that, like Nana, he thought I was mentally unhinged. I don’t recall a punishment.

  My older brother Andrew, closest to me in age and a beautiful child, told a care worker to shut up when she said something nasty to me—I wet the bed and it may have been about that. She told him if he said things like that she’d have to wash his mouth out with soap. He told her to shut up again and she washed his mouth out with soap.

  My younger brother Lachlan, not yet two, was in the babies’ section at the home, divided from us by a high wire fence. When I went to the fence to talk to him, he threw himself on the ground and screamed. I think he wanted to get out. One of the workers on his side of the fence shooed me away. Mum came to visit us on the Saturday with Nana, who brought chicken. I don’t remember anything they said. They left and we were there for what felt like a long time. It was two weeks, one of my brothers said later.

  Tolstoy said all happy families are alike. Jeanette Winterson’s mother asked why be happy when you can be normal. Our family didn’t have the wherewithal for even the semblance of normal. Dad worked from around four in the afternoon until one in the morning. He was a journalist on the sub-editing desk at The Courier-Mail, so he helped to create the newspaper each night. Mostly Mum was on her own with us kids.

  In the mornings, we had to be extra quiet because Dad finished work so late and needed to sleep. I would lie in bed and tell myself stories or get up and make funny faces in the mirror. If we did make too much noise, and this happened frequently, Dad would yell from the bedroom. If we were really noisy, and this happened frequently too, he would stomp out and yell at us in person.

  Our house was a mess. We drew all over the walls in crayon. We didn’t pick up after ourselves. At school, we never had those pre-peeled oranges other kids had. We might have benefited from Supernanny but there was no Supernanny in those days and I know for a fact I would have hated her. I can’t even watch the show as an adult without becoming annoyed.

  We were more Addams Family than Brady Bunch—not like the Wadleys, the even larger Catholic family contemporary to ours: Nana’s friends Sir Douglas and Lady Vera; their two boys John and Peter, who grew up with Mum; John’s wife Denise, who’d worked as a journalist with Mum before either of them married; and a stack of kids we went to school with. If we were whirling-dervish-wedding-silver odd, the Wadleys were Denise’s-column-in-The-Courier-Mail-Fig-Tree-Pocket-family-fun perfect. We wore our damage openly because we didn’t have a choice. Perhaps if I’d seen their back rooms I’d have discovered that other families, maybe even the Wadleys, were damaged too.

  While we weren’t normal, I wouldn’t have said we were unhappy—not us kids, anyway. Mum was a kindly presence in our lives and enormous fun when she was feeling bright. Dad wasn’t kindly really, but he wasn’t present much either. I remember noticing a difference when I first visited other children’s houses. One family at Indooroopilly had twins the same age as me, and their father ran around chasing them with an axe. When he caught them he hog-tied them in the backyard. As I say, it’s possible every family has its damaged places, but the father meant well, I’m fairly sure. I do recall a sense of alarm as he held the axe above his head and screamed at his son in a way my father probably wouldn’t have screamed at Andrew. He said he was an Indian.

  The first thing I learned at school is that being full of beans is not helpful in a classroom with forty other children, at least as far as teachers are concerned. If someone had thought to explain it to me that way—I’m sorry, dear, but no one can keep forty children still for six hours straight—instead of saying I was the problem, for wriggling, for talking, for being bored, I think I might have hated school less.

  As a child, I was routinely mistaken for one of four boys rather than the only girl in our family. I watched the wrestling on the television wearing underpants and a singlet so that I could act it out, and I wanted to be a range of superheroes, all male. My gender identity, although that wasn’t what I would have called it, was to do with clothes—my brothers’ pants and t-shirts, and that haircut favoured by my mother (who at some stage bought a bowl for the purpose, which at least smoothed the right angles off)—but also what I came to like. Mum and Dad gave me a doll for Christmas one year, and I gave it to the girl up the street. My brothers were my first playmates. I played their games. They treated me as one of them. I felt like one of them.

  I was the smallest in my class, and also the youngest. There was nothing I liked about school, not the routine, certainly not the uniform—a dress—and not the rules. I was often labelled attention-seeking, as a criticism rather than a compliment. I was still so small by year three that one day, when I’d been down to visit Lachlan, who was s
till in preschool, I was mistaken for a preschool child from a distance as I headed back up to the big school. I quickly ran away from the teacher, who was beckoning me back to preschool. For weeks afterwards, I expected she’d come up to the big school to get me and take me back to prep for being too small.

  By then, I’d discovered that when you’re small the best way to get noticed is to do things you’re not supposed to do. I became quite good at it. I liked being noticed. I don’t know if this is more or less considered normal for children. I don’t know if I had some deficit in my sense of self that made me feel not quite good enough or if all children feel that way. I’ve often wondered, given what came later. Was I marked from birth? Was there some flaw in me that made me more likely to falter on the road to adulthood? And if there was, exactly what was it? I did have an absolute belief that grown-ups were good, perhaps because in my childhood most of them had been.

  Mum normally dropped the two big boys at the train for their school in the city and then took me to the convent before dropping Lachlan at the preschool. One day, I was sick—not terribly sick, a little fever—but Mum said I could stay home with her. I watched as the preschool teacher peeled Lachlan one finger at a time from Mum. After we left, she bought me an ice-cream and took me for a drive and I didn’t have to find the way home. I remember the winter sun coming in through the windscreen on the way out to the farmlands of Brookfield, having Mum all to myself, and then waking with melted ice-cream all over my shirt when she stopped the car in our driveway, being mad that I’d fallen asleep and wasted some of the day we had together.

  The midday movie was The Old Man and the Sea. The old man was losing his fish, and I couldn’t stop crying, loud gut-wrenching sobs. Mum, who very much wanted to see Anthony Quinn in the role of Hemingway’s great character, was perplexed about what to do. Finally she turned down the sound and we watched it silently. There wasn’t any dialogue and without the sad music, my cheeriness returned. My uncle Tony suggested, when Mum told him later what she’d done, that she could have turned down the brightness as well and we could have watched the black screen together. When I swallowed Jesus, Mary and Joseph from our nativity scene a few years before it had been Tony who’d said, when Mum rang him in a panic for medical advice, that it would be better if she rang the priest.