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For a Girl Page 5
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In my last months of high school, I applied for a cadetship in journalism with Queensland Newspapers. I was offered a position at the afternoon daily, The Telegraph. When I finished school, I started in Women’s News, run by the formidable Miss Erica Parker who, in addition to editing Women’s News for the paper, also wrote her own daily column, ‘Parker Point’.
Before I started at the paper, my mother took me into the city to buy grown-up clothes: a pleated grey skirt and blouse, a blue dress with a red tie at the front, pantihose, bras—things I’d never worn. Except for school uniforms, I still wore pants; not my brothers’ hand-me-downs anymore but jeans and t-shirts. I went to work in my new clothes and felt like a grown-up.
Miss Parker had dyed bluish hair in a bun that looked so tight it lifted the flesh around her eyes. She wore thick eyeliner and eyeshadow matching her eyes. She chain-smoked. I soon learned that when the sub-editors changed her prose as a columnist, which is their job, Miss Parker would change it back when she got the pages to proof as Women’s News editor.
Other cadets had to circulate through different areas—sport, general news, the television guide. But I wouldn’t have to do that, Miss Parker said in my first month. I would just stay with her. I admired her. Within a month of starting, I was writing feature articles on issues I was interested in. I wrote a story about skincare products and how they have no evidence base, another about intelligence and how it’s measured. Miss Parker sometimes gave me a by-line. There would be the headline on the story and then it would say ‘by Mary-Rose MacColl’. And then there would be the words I’d written.
I stayed out of the darkroom. My colleagues in Women’s News warned me that the picture editor was a groper. I went to the compositors’ room where they set the news in lead on the big linotype machines. I talked to the men who worked with my father, who said if I was lucky I’d be a chip off that old block. I went to the presses to see their fabulous machinery turning out thousands of newspapers.
I was spending less time with my teacher and her husband now that I was working, more time with my work colleagues. Soon I would be at university, studying the journalism degree that was a requirement of my cadetship. I talked to my friend Jessica’s father who was a bank manager about borrowing money to buy a car.
As I write this now, I wonder how my life might have been different. If I hadn’t had you, would I have come to see my teacher and her husband through different eyes? Would they have faded like other heroes and become just ordinary? If I hadn’t had you, would everything have been different, and is this an all right thing for me to think about, or should I only be thankful that you were born, that you live and breathe in the world somewhere?
I am thankful that you live and breathe in the world somewhere.
After my loan was approved, my teacher’s husband arranged for me to buy the car from a friend of his who had a car yard at Redcliffe. Once I had my own car, I wanted to drive around by myself, but my teacher’s husband said I shouldn’t drive on my own until I was more confident behind the wheel.
On Anzac Day, I was picked to cover the dawn service and parade for The Telegraph. They sent me, a cadet with a few months’ experience, rather than a more senior journalist. Miss Parker said this was because the stories I’d been writing in Women’s News had been noticed and so now I was being entrusted with an event of great importance in the general news area. She said I must watch carefully.
I picked up the photographer before 4 am and we drove into the city and parked in a no-standing zone using our Press: Please Pass dashboard card. The photographer was grumpy at first to be going out so early and we didn’t talk much on the way. Normally he would have driven—photographers drove reporters, not the other way round—but he’d lost his licence for drinking and driving and so he had to put up with being driven around by a girl. Even driving The Telegraph car felt like a mark of trust.
We arrived at the service and they played ‘The Last Post’ and then there was the silence. I was crying. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ I whispered to the photographer after the silence ended. He went to say something but stopped himself when he saw my face, nodded instead and smiled at me. On the way back to the office, he told me I did a good job, said the piece I’d written about Simpson and his donkey—I’d found a modern-day Simpson with a modern-day donkey and phoned it in—should run on page one. It didn’t run on page one. It was on page twelve, at the bottom, with my photographer’s excellent picture.
One night, my teacher’s husband and I went to visit his friend who had the car yard, the one I’d bought my car from. There may have been something that had to be added to my car, I don’t remember, but my teacher didn’t come with us. The friend had been in Vietnam with my teacher’s husband. It was a special bond, my teacher’s husband said, one I wouldn’t understand. After we’d visited his friend, we all went to drink at a hotel. I drank a lot of beer. My teacher’s husband was driving my car. After we left his friend, he drove me to the beach. It was dark. He kissed me, touched me.
For twenty-five years I remembered it this way. We had too much to drink. We went off the rails, over the edge, did the naughty but nice things.
My right leg aches and aches until one afternoon, when I am on the floor crying and afraid, there is another remembering.
The man and girl are on the beach and they are kissing and he is touching her and she him. And he is moving now, taking off her jeans, her pants, his own, and she is saying stop we better stop, she is laughing as she says it but her laugh is shallow, nervous, like her breathing, and he is saying it’s too late it’s too late and he is on top of her and she is yelling now to stop and she is pushing her right leg against him, she is trying to kick, she is crossing her right leg over her left but she is not strong enough his arms are holding her, his legs are holding her in place and he is hurting hurting hurting she is young younger than you think and it is done.
And then I am alive and I am shaking and crying and cannot stop.
My body knows
IT WAS A SATURDAY MORNING a month and a half later and I was with Wendy, my friend from All Hallows’. Like me, Wendy left the school in year ten. I hadn’t seen much of her, but she’d phoned me a few weeks before out of the blue and suggested we go and see Sister Maureen, our old maths teacher, who’d left the order to marry a widower with five children. We didn’t have to call her Sister Maureen anymore, Wendy said when we were on our way. Now we could just call her Maureen.
I wanted very much to see Sister Maureen who was from my old life. I was feeling so afraid.
During the week, I had taken a specimen of urine to a pharmacist. Three days, the pharmacist said. Saturday was the third day. I asked Wendy to stop so I could make a call. I didn’t say who I was calling. I rang the pharmacist. He said, ‘Congratulations, you’re going to have a baby.’
The light was soft as it often is in autumn in Queensland. The sun had started on its journey away from us and even the Pacific Highway, one of the ugliest roads on earth, looked at ease, ready to receive us. I lay down outside the phone booth on the hard brown grass next to the highway, staring up at the blue sky.
It was as if my body knew something my mind did not.
Wendy wanted to know what was wrong. ‘Someone died,’ I told her.
‘Were you close?’ she said.
‘I don’t know.’
We visited Maureen but I couldn’t get my head around her name. I kept calling her Sister: yes, Sister; thank you, Sister; no thank you, Sister. She laughed when I did this. She mothered five children now; she was no longer Sister. She had such a lovely laugh. Sister Maureen served tinned asparagus, which I’d never eaten. I’ve never forgotten the taste. Every time I eat tinned asparagus, I am back there. Sister Maureen beamed at us and said, ‘Look at you, you grand girls. I always knew you’d make good.’
I had turned eighteen just a few months before. My colleagues in Women’s News bought a cake and sang: Janne, who did the fashion; Elaine, who wrote features; and Miss P
arker herself, who had been so kind to me. All of them kind. I was eighteen, an adult. I had been feeling so grown-up. But now I was feeling very small.
I didn’t think of you. I didn’t think of you that day, nor any day through the long months we spent together. I didn’t think of you. I went home and told no one. I made plans to go somewhere else. I told myself I would go somewhere and have it and give it up. I called you ‘it’ in all the time we were together. To be honest, I had no idea who or what you were.
My teacher and her husband guessed. They forced it out of me one night the following week when I was at their house. I had said I might leave my job as a cadet journalist—I couldn’t think what else I’d do—and they wanted to know why. I was in a big lounge chair curled up small and they leaned over me, one on either side, and demanded to know what was going on, demanded that I speak. I was shaking all over, wanting to disappear. The shame I felt. This was all my fault, I was sure. The beach, the night I drank too much. We did the naughty but nice things. We succumbed. I burst into tears and told them. I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.
They told me not to worry. They would fix it.
The next day, my teacher’s husband contacted a priest, an ex-army chaplain in Melbourne, who knew of a home for girls where I could stay. We agreed I should go away. Melbourne was a city they knew well that I’d never seen. Our family went to Sydney once, towing a caravan, when I was twelve, but other than that we’d only been close to Brisbane for holidays. My teacher and her husband told me it would be an adventure. I believed it would be an adventure. They would come down for the birth, they said. They would visit me and everything would be all right.
Over the next week, I told everyone I was going to leave my job as a journalist. I was casual in the saying of it, didn’t tell them why. I said I wanted to travel. This was shocking to my parents, to Miss Parker. I had been one of four successful applicants for cadetships from among more than four hundred who applied, Miss Parker said. How could I throw that away? She couldn’t understand me.
My teacher and her husband talked, but I was not included. My teacher was unwell, an unspecified unwellness later diagnosed as endometriosis. They had no children. My teacher’s husband called them brats, said he didn’t want to end up like his siblings who had brats. He told me I had upset my teacher. I felt bad for what I’d done, what I’d done to my teacher. She wasn’t harsh with me but I was sure she blamed me. I blamed myself. It was all my fault and I had to make it right. We agreed it would be best to keep my pregnancy a secret from everyone but my family.
We also agreed that while I should tell my parents I was pregnant, I shouldn’t tell them my teacher’s husband was the father. If people knew, the scandal would cost him his commission as an army officer.
My mother had guessed about the pregnancy as soon as I announced I was going to quit the job I loved so much. More to the point, first thing every morning I vomited. When I told her the father was a journalist I met at a party, she went very quiet and looked hard at me.
‘I was drunk,’ I said, ‘and I don’t know his name.’ I closed my mouth and set it tight. I would not say more.
My father pushed until my mother turned to him and said, ‘That’s enough, Mac.’
Strangely, of all the things I later worried about, this was the worst: that I agreed to tell my mother I became pregnant when drunk, having sex with a man whose name I couldn’t remember.
My parents would have been happy for me to stay in Brisbane instead of going away to Melbourne. We were not a family that had the luxury of caring much about its reputation, and Catholic Church rules were the least of our failures of social expectations. My father’s family’s Catholicism was two generations back. His French grandmother had been devout. Dad always claimed to be without religious beliefs, atheist not agnostic, any time I asked him. He may have converted to marry Mum, but he was just fibbing if he did. Mum was softly creative and flexible in a family full of Catholic pragmatists, run staunchly by Nana, who took charge of her children’s affairs her whole long life. Nana was a devout Catholic, attended Mass every morning, and told me to take the confirmation name Josephine so I’d have a peaceful death.
‘You don’t have to go away on our account,’ Mum said. ‘Only if you’ll feel better.’ She looked at me again. I thought she might be going to say more but she didn’t.
By this time, the Catholic Church had already started to change anyway, to modernise. Girls who got pregnant were not wicked in those days; they were stupid. There was good contraception, family planning clinics. We were not bad, except in the eyes of one or two old ladies and the conservative end of the Church, which was losing ground.
While contraception and abortion remained mortal sins, there were priests who took a broad ethical view, who accepted that divorcees might remarry, who baptised the children of non-Catholics, who were kind in the face of sin. Most young women wouldn’t have thought twice about going on the pill. Priests and nuns were leaving in droves, pairing up and making new lives. I was not the mortal sinner that girls who were pregnant a decade before were, but I was not a good person either. I was a dolt.
Of course I had to go away. My teacher and her husband had said if anyone knew about the pregnancy, he would be in trouble. Other people didn’t understand. Of course I had to go away.
Before I left The Telegraph I told Miss Parker I was pregnant. She had been miffed when I gave her my letter of resignation, citing no reason other than a desire to travel, so I told her the story I’d told my parents.
Then she was annoyed with me all over again. ‘That was stupid,’ she said. ‘Very stupid. You are a little fool.’
She meant getting pregnant. She meant throwing away my career, because she could see, as I couldn’t, that I would not get it back. She wanted to know who the journalist was, the father. I said I didn’t know.
Even if she called me a fool, Miss Parker understood my leaving. The world was starting to change, but leaving was what girls had done for years in Brisbane and Miss Parker was on the conservative side of conservatism.
She asked if she could tell the editor of the paper. I said she couldn’t. I was worried for my teacher and her husband. The more people who knew, the more likely he’d be in trouble.
Miss Parker shook her head, called me a fool again, and said to come back when it was over and she’d see what she could do.
My father wanted us to have a conversation about abortion. I’d resigned and was about to leave for Melbourne. Dad had been asking why I couldn’t tell them the journalist’s name, why I didn’t remember.
‘Shouldn’t we find him?’ Dad said to me, to Mum.
‘I do not want to find him, no,’ I said.
Dad said to Mum then, in my hearing, ‘I don’t see why she can’t just look after it.’ At first, I thought he meant the baby; look after the baby.
I was silent.
Mum said, ‘Mac, she can’t do that.’
When I realised he meant have an abortion not keep a baby, I left the room in tears, not because of any regard for the child growing inside me, but because I had been to the seminars at school run by Right to Life. They turned out the lights in the concert hall at All Hallows’ so we could see properly. They showed us hundred or so schoolgirls the slides they brought with them in their carousel, the tiny perfect feet between a finger and thumb proving categorically that life begins at conception, the burgeoning foetus at time of termination. They told us about the different methods used and how much pain the baby felt. The suction method, the saltwater death, the poisons. I had been told about the evil of abortion. I knew it to be murder. I would never have an abortion, I told my father.
A year later, when I became pregnant again, I had an abortion without hesitation.
101 Grattan Street
I LEFT BRISBANE AFTER I finished up at The Telegraph and drove my car to Melbourne with my oldest brother, Ian. Crossing the border from New South Wales to Victoria at 3 am, I was spooked by big gums hanging over both
sides of the highway at Echuca. I was as far from home as I’d ever been. Ian was asleep on the back seat and I couldn’t rouse him no matter how hard I tried. I longed for a human voice, so I turned on the radio and listened to country music. It was Johnny Cash, ‘The Long Black Veil’, which made me laugh—the reach of Dugald. At dawn, we had apple pie and cream and ice-cream for breakfast at a truck stop Ian knew from another trip.
At eleven o’clock that morning, Ian left me at St Joseph’s Convent in Grattan Street, Carlton. He was going to stay with friends and then hitch a ride home to Brisbane. I remember I didn’t want him to go; I stalled him with small talk at the gate, became close to desperate as he became keener to extract himself. Finally, he said he must go and off he went.
I waited a few moments more and then went up the path to the door and rang the bell. It was answered by a nervous-looking nun who took me into a parlour and said she’d get Sister Mary, who was in charge of the girls. The first nun made me a cup of tea. There were lemon crisp biscuits. I took two. She watched me eat them. I worried about the crumbs.
In Melbourne during that time, someone who caught the tram from the city, alighted at the corner of Swanston and Grattan streets and headed along Grattan would pass the Royal Women’s Hospital across Swanston on their left. They would cross another street and then walk a little way further to 99 Grattan, which would be followed by 103, a double terrace, St Joseph’s Convent, where the Sisters of St Joseph lived. That was the door I was told to knock on. There was no 101 Grattan Street.