For a Girl Read online

  He was never disingenuous. A thing was black or white and sometimes it changed from one to the other. The change was sincere and it was absolute. He described himself as superhuman and worked hard to make it true. He was fit, did well at study once he started. He had been badly injured in his mid-twenties when a fire extinguisher he was disarming blew up. The doctors wanted to amputate his arm but he said no. He rehabilitated himself and regained almost full use.

  To the girl I was, my teacher’s husband was larger than life. I believed he was as powerful as he made himself out to be, but even so he wasn’t a hero. We had nothing in common.

  I am reminded just now of Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés and the story of the ugly duckling who approaches all manner of creature before she finds her pack. I had no idea who my people were.

  My teacher’s husband had a temper. I don’t know how much was his nature and how much was his experience in Vietnam; he turned twenty-one there and while he seldom spoke of his experiences, a youth spent in a war is no youth. One lunchtime he lost his temper with me. I disagreed with something he said and I remained firm in my disagreement as he became annoyed. I don’t remember the subject. I’m sure I provoked him. I think I wanted to see what would happen.

  His face drained of colour except for a vein in the middle of his forehead that pulsed slowly. He set his eyes on me and walked over to the chair where I was sitting. Without saying a word, he picked me up and tossed me over his shoulder, just like that. I called out to him to stop, half laughing with the shock of it. Then I struggled to get away but found I could not. He carried me into the bathroom and put me into the tub and turned on the cold shower tap and said in a quiet voice, ‘There, that will cool you down, you bitch.’ He left me there.

  My teacher came and helped me out of the bath. She didn’t say anything to him. My clothes were wet and clung to my body and I felt self-conscious. I also felt the aftermath of fear, catching my breath. And I felt ashamed. I had never made anyone this angry. It was shocking to me. My teacher’s husband was so strong, superhumanly strong. He was a grown-up, in charge. If he was this angry, it must be my fault.

  Byron tsunami

  OTIS AND I WERE ON the beach this morning when the police came along in their truck. In the company of a child building castles with drips of wet sand—an enormously satisfying activity—it is hard to muster up any energy for negative emotions. Even sharks can seem benign.

  The Byron Bay police are as relaxed as people who make sand-drip castles. They stopped on the beach and then a slow-talking metallic voice came through the loudspeakers on either side of the truck. ‘There is a tsunami scheduled for eleven o’clock somewhere along the east coast of Australia. It’s your decision to remain on the beach. We’re just giving the warning because that’s our job.’ I wondered at the use of the word ‘scheduled’.

  On the Gold Coast, I learned later, they closed the beaches, but this was Byron Bay, where individual freedom was highly valued.

  I thought of Indonesia, as many people did. I heard conversations on the way to the car.

  ‘The sea sucks out first.’

  ‘Well, when it does, we’ll go home for lunch.’

  ‘It’s a ripper and apparently we’re deadset in its path.’

  ‘Wicked!’

  ‘Which board d’ya reckon?’

  Otis told me it was probably called a tsunami because sometimes the army comes. That sounds about right, I said. We headed for higher ground and the farm. The cows saw no danger they could tell us about.

  I have a writing table here at the farm, simple pine boards on tube-steel legs on the veranda of our cottage. The table overlooks a hillside at the bottom of which is a deep dam that runs into a creek where we found dragonflies such as I haven’t seen since my childhood. Today the cows are on the opposite hillside. You can watch cows for a long time and not get bored.

  This is a place you might hold a story in your hands, a place that might take your story and hand it back to you at peace.

  I would like to tell you more about Otis, but I am hesitant too, for everything I say about him is something I should know about you and don’t, something I would know, I cannot make up for, something I must let go of as I cannot change it.

  Jump-cuts

  MY RIGHT LEG ACHES MOST days, along that large muscle at the front of the thigh. Sometimes it’s as if someone unscrewed it from the hip in the night and screwed it back on but cross-threaded. If I swim or cycle, I feel my whole body bunch up on the right side, containing me, as if I might spill out otherwise. I don’t walk straight.

  The physiotherapist who told me to stop sleeping like Superman gave me a little blue ball with soft plastic spikes that recall instruments of torture. Some nights I lie facedown on the ball, positioning it at the trigger point at the top of my right leg where it hurts most. I roll it down the muscle, find the lumps. The pain is intense.

  My right leg remembers. It twists and turns and wakes me in the night. When it stops aching it leaves a searing hot pain in the large muscle that covers my heart from behind.

  We come to the things I am hesitant to write about. There are a number of reasons, themselves not easy to articulate. They say the past is another country and we surely are another race within it. I can no more understand the teenage me than I can understand people who are speaking a language foreign to me. Even less can I understand what motivated someone else, what motivated my teacher, her husband. How can I hope to make someone else understand?

  I am used to doing two sorts of writing: corporate writing, where I make facts seem believable, and creative writing, where I make fiction seem believable. This writing is different. I am not seeking to make anything believable and these are the slippery sort of facts that depend so much on where you see things from. I am struggling here for I want most of all to be truthful.

  Telling the truth does not mean I will be objective. In fiction, we talk of the point-of-view character, the character who mediates the words and actions of all the other characters in a story. Some point-of-view characters are notoriously biased. Others tell bold-faced lies. Even the relatively harmless can only see the world through their own eyes. I am the point-of-view character in my story and can only see what I have seen. I am truthful but truth is rarely objective.

  There are things that concern my teacher’s husband, and it may be they are better left unsaid. I cannot know. I can only go blindly into this place.

  And there is fear, and fear is real. Fear is always real.

  I have no recollection of when my teacher’s husband started touching me. I only have these scenes that jump-cut to other scenes. This is common, I read later in my life. We deal with trauma by breaking it into manageable bites and storing those. We bring them out when we can deal with them. Some parts of that period of my life have not come back, may never come back.

  The City Botanic Gardens. We are lying down on the riverbank and kissing. He has his hands down my pants and I am dizzy and nervous. Constitution Hill, on the way home from his parents’ house. We kiss and he touches me. The footbridge near Marist Brothers. He is dropping me home from their place. We have pulled over and we are kissing. I don’t remember enjoying these experiences. I like the power I have, or think I have. And I am curious. I want to see what will happen.

  At some stage, my teacher guessed what we were doing—we came home with grass in our clothes—and at that time I think she might have wanted to put a stop to it. She went to see my mother. She said I was a nuisance, wouldn’t leave them alone, and that Mum should intervene. She told Mum she was worried about what people would think of me running around the yard with her husband in nothing but swimming togs. Mum did speak to me about it, said I shouldn’t be spending so much time with them, but she had no idea what was really happening and I ignored her, told her I was going somewhere else when I went to their place.

  My teacher told her husband she’d been to see Mum. He fixed it, he told me afterwards. He told her that
we shouldn’t end a good friendship, that what happened was understandable—we were spending so much time together and we were all so close; he and I fell off the rails was all—and that it wouldn’t happen again, that I was in trouble and needed them in my life to help me. My teacher accepted this. She contacted my mother and said not to worry. Her husband said we mustn’t kiss anymore.

  When I was a teenager, before I knew my teacher and her husband, John Denver became one of my heroes. I bought his records. I bought a book about him. I learned to play his songs on the guitar. I remember the book said his vocal range was an amazing two and a half octaves. It suggested if you wanted to understand what that meant, you should try to sing along with ‘The Eagle and the Hawk’, so I tried and found I couldn’t.

  In year eleven, my class went on a camp to Binna Burra in Lamington National Park. My parents had never been national park people. I doubt we ever bushwalked together. But when I went into that rainforest for the first time—the play of light, the density and range of greens, the smells of humus and life abounding, the peace of those massive trees—I knew I was in a spiritual place, the place where creation belongs. John Denver was somehow part of this spiritual place for me.

  In my twenties, I was too cynical for John Denver, disbelieving for a time in the goodness of the world that had been the core belief of my life. I commented wryly on his drinking, his philandering, his golf-playing. He became the butt of my jokes. In my early thirties, I went to see him in concert. He was not my hero anymore and his stylised country shirts with gold embroidering and his white slacks and shoes were not the clothing the protector of Alaska I recalled and loved would have worn.

  Just lately, though, I have been listening again to John Denver, liking what I liked in the first place, the simple trust expressed in his songs. He wrote beautiful songs: ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’, ‘Starwood in Aspen’, ‘Rocky Mountain High’, ‘The Eagle and the Hawk’. They are songs that celebrate the natural world and the human spirit within it.

  I used to buy John Denver records for my teacher. We would play them together and listen to the words. I believed she knew what it meant, that connection John Denver had with the natural world, the spiritual world. I thought she understood in a way no one else did. One weekend, her husband was away on an exercise. I’d told her about the biology camp at Binna Burra, how it had affected me. On the Sunday, she drove me up to Binna Burra and we went walking. Later, in a pottery course, she made a vase that looked a bit like a tallowwood trunk and gave it to me.

  Later in year eleven, after my teacher’s husband and I resumed kissing, I started sleeping in their bed with them. This was his idea. We’ll all cuddle, he said. I was eager. I longed for more of my teacher’s attention and affection. I would have done anything for her. My teacher went along with her husband’s suggestion. I don’t know if she was keen or reluctant; perhaps she was both.

  In their bed, it was cuddling at first, but the cuddling quickly became sexual. They both touched me. When one was touching me, the other slept or pretended to sleep, as if they didn’t know what was going on. I learned a lot about sexual contact, had orgasms, although at the time I didn’t know what they were. There was no intercourse. I touched both of them as well. I learned what you do. They knew all about it. They taught me what you do.

  We never discussed what was happening among the three of us. I had sexual experiences with my teacher or with her husband and they didn’t talk about it in my hearing. They had sex during this time, as far as I know, although I was never involved. When I was in their bed, I was in the middle. They would touch me all over and sometimes I became so excited it felt as if I’d explode.

  I know my teacher and her husband talked between themselves about the sexual touching they were doing because he told me that one night they decided one of them would touch the top half of me and the other would touch the bottom half. He told me this as a joke. He thought it was funny. I remember the night he was talking about. I was terrified their hands would find each other’s.

  When I was in therapy in my late thirties, I couldn’t write about what happened with my teacher and her husband and the therapist suggested I draw something, since drawing was less contrived for me. I am good at tricking people, even tricking myself, with words. I’m not so good with drawing. I drew three people in a bed, the middle one curled up. Then I drew a winged creature leaving the bed. I could not get up from that bed on my feet. I could only do it with wings.

  When my teacher and I talked, it was guilty talk, what terrible wrong we’d done. She went to see a priest and confessed. She sent me along to the same priest and I confessed. Homosexuality. That’s what we confessed. The priest told me it was a sin but many women committed it. My teacher and I agreed it wouldn’t happen again and then it happened again.

  With my teacher’s husband it was different. He called what we were doing the naughty but nice things of life, said we weren’t harming anyone else, said it was better for me to learn about sex from good people than from some pimple-faced idiot.

  During year twelve at Saint Catherine’s, I started to resent my teacher’s husband’s control over my life. The strong views about the world that had reassured me now started to feel suffocating. You weren’t allowed to disagree. He started to express strong views about what I should do. He believed my parents were not good parents, which I came to resent. He called my father a cuckoo when I told him that Dad didn’t like him, didn’t like me spending so much time with him. He said my parents set a bad example. They smoked. So did I. He hated smoking. He said they hadn’t taught me manners. Sometimes I argued with his strong views. Mostly I didn’t. I came to feel ashamed of my family, ashamed of who I was.

  I met up with one of the girls I’d been friendly with at All Hallows’, Marlene, who’d become involved in drugs, marijuana and a thing called Dutch acid which I assume was LSD by another name. Without meeting her, my teacher’s husband took a dislike to Marlene. It made me like her even more. I missed days at school and went to Marlene’s place.

  Marlene and her brother were bright and I loved being with them. We listened to music together. We listened to Rodriguez. We thought we knew something. We could never quite articulate what it was we knew but that too was okay. It was different having friends my own age again—friends who, like me, didn’t know everything, who were searching.

  Marlene got some marijuana for me to take on a school camp. Soon after, her house was raided by the drug squad. In an interview, she and her brother were accused of selling drugs to school kids (Marlene finished a year ahead of me because I repeated), which would involve much more serious charges than possession. Marlene was convinced it was me who contacted the drug squad since they knew she’d sold drugs at a school and I was the only one of us whose house wasn’t raided. No amount of protest from me convinced her of my innocence. She is a social worker now, I believe, working with street kids. She has not spoken to me since what she believed was my betrayal.

  My teacher’s husband told me he didn’t contact the drug squad. I believed him, although I now see that he was the only one with the information. He was a freemason and often mentioned the contacts he had in different places. Then he told me he did ring the drug squad but only after Marlene and her brother had been charged and only to make sure they didn’t raid my house. He vouched for me, he said, rescued me, but he wasn’t the one who told the drug squad about Marlene. Someone else did that, he said.

  My teacher’s husband didn’t like Marlene, didn’t like me spending time with her. He would have told himself he was protecting me from drugs. He would have told himself he was doing the right thing. He had strong views about right and wrong. Even now, I find it hard to believe he lied to me, but of course he did. He called the drug squad and I lost Marlene, my only friend other than him and my teacher.

  By the time I was finishing year twelve, I was spending every spare moment with my teacher and her husband. I missed days of school. I remember my teacher dropping me off one m
idday, a few minutes late for an exam, down the back of the school so no one would see. I was worried I’d fail the exam. ‘What have you got to worry about?’ she said. ‘Just think about this: you conquered your teacher.’ I’m sure this is how she saw what had happened.

  Except for the sexual contact, our relationship was a friendship, although it must have looked odd to some people. I was a teenage girl and they were a couple in their late twenties. We went to the beach, we went on walks. They were older, more responsible. I viewed them this way. They viewed themselves this way. I met their families, their friends. I was introduced as a girl from the school. They were helping me. That’s what people thought. I was troubled and they were helping me. It was what I thought. They were more like parents to me than friends.

  At the end of year twelve, when all of the finishing high school students go to the coast, my teacher and her husband came to the beach where I was staying with girls from my class. We were lying on the beach at night and my teacher and I were touching each other and her husband was pretending to sleep on her other side and he sat up and said they should go home and she said it was up to me. I said for them to stay.

  When I got back to the apartment where the other girls were staying, I felt like an alien. This was the way I felt among my peers in those months. We were no longer the same. These were girls with boyfriends and lockets, who had no experience of the things I was experiencing. I felt different, superior, like I knew everything that mattered, but also estranged, untouchable. I had nothing in common with these girls anymore and, although I didn’t know it, I could never go back to being among them.