Sawdust (13 page)

As always, without even being allowed to go out, I was growing up fast
. But my father, my teacher, my Lord Protector remained relentless, and back at school, the taunts only grew worse.

Did they have spies out there? Or just very intuitive gossips? Because as far as other boys went, despite their sometimes quite arduous endeavours, I was far less active, far less of a “hunter” or even a “gatherer” or even an “experimenter” than ninety-five percent of the other girls.

Yet everyday on my way to school I would feel it. The pinch of accusation and smear. By the time the school bus arrived at our stop on the Bruce Highway, almost always the bus was already more than halfway full and there would be no empty double seats left. I would have to sit next to someone. Only no one wanted to sit next to me. So I had to stand. But even when I did manage to rush into a seat next to someone, they would slide themselves right up against the side panel of the bus in order to get as far as possible from me.

Often even, the particular kid I sat next to would get up and go and sit somewhere else. Crowded places, believe me, can be pretty bloody isolating. Every day on that bus, to and from school, I experienced it.

And the mocking only grew.

There was this one brave boy at the school – he had to be brave if he was openly talking to me in the schoolyard – who asked me to be his girlfriend. It was as simple as that at school. The way kids sometimes became boyfriend and girlfriend. We’d spoken a few times and there was no two ways about it, Simm was quite a handsome lad.

So, I said yes, and we became boyfriend and girlfriend. After a couple of weeks an old friend, Laura, who definitely knew the family history from primary school, started to lay claims on Simm. I guess she was pretty upfront, because she asked me outright if Simm could be her boyfriend instead of mine.

‘No, no, don’t be silly.’ I looked at her like she was out of her tree. ‘He’s my boyfriend. You can’t do that.’

‘Well then I’ll tell everyone about you and your father!’ She yelled it out without the slightest sense of privacy or decorum, for the entire playground to hear.

It stung. Oh God, it stung. As if most weren’t in on the gossip already. But it stung so bad with Laura that I capitulated. ‘Okay then, you can have him if you really want him. I don’t care.’

I walked away, only to hear her behind me, ‘Naaa-naaa-nanna-na-naaa... I got your boyfriend.’

‘Leave me alone,’ I mumbled back.

She continued... ‘Naaa-naaa-nanna-na-naaa... I got your boyfriend.’

‘Okay, so tell me more!’ I wished for a moment I could actually be like Dad, and tell her to bugger off or I’d rip her head off. I felt the blood in me whistling like a rattling kettle.

She started to push me.

I pushed her back. ‘I don’t want to fight with you. I’ve given you my boyfriend. What more do you want?’

She pushed me back again, this time adding: ‘Yeah, yeah, but you let your father fuck you. You’re a father-fucker… Father-fucker! Father-fucker!’ She sung it; she actually sung it, like a nursery rhyme, only so loud that even kids who knew nothing about me now suddenly knew everything. I felt so beaten, so, so degraded I could die.

The whistle in the kettle steamed over; it burnt through my eyes and into my chest and out through my badly maturing breasts, and suddenly my fists were flying. I laid into her with everything I had. And it must have been pretty hard – all that cow milking and working out in the paddock, I guess – because instead of fighting back she was raising her arms to protect herself and crying for me to stop.

Finally, I cannot remember how or by whom, the fight was ended. But my once friend was taken to hospital and sometime later returned to school with a plaster cast. I had broken her arm!

I was confused and afraid and at the same time amazed that I could hurt another human being like that. Everybody knew about me now, not only how perverse I was but how wild and crazy; I felt like jumping off the planet.

The next day when I climbed on the school bus and went to sit next to one of the kids, I was expecting the usual treatment. Only worse. Maybe even to get a belting. I put my head down like I couldn’t see anyone. I definitely did not want to see any of them.

Nervously, shifting in next to one of the boys, I found he did not even move. Not an inch. No word said. Not on the entire bus. It was like in that silence, in that lack of movement, everything had been returned to normal.

I remember it as “returned to normal” because there was this one big difference in that motionless silence. With the sky outside its usual thin, metallic blue and the sun busily making its way across that dry central Queensland heaven, suddenly an empty seat was an empty seat again. Not a word said, not a movement made.

I am sure I even saw a smile as I sat down. I think so. It really was quite bizarre – to go from villain one day to hero the next, or at any rate just to a plain, simple “normal” kid. I was someone people would sit next to again.

If I had lost that fight, I have no doubts, the insults would have continued, even more pronounced. Everyone, not just Laura, would have been singing that taunt:
‘
Naaa-naaa-nanna-na-naaa... Father-fucker! Father-fucker!
’
It’s not the way I would like the world to be because there are too many weak people out there who cannot defend themselves.

Nevertheless, I felt like I had achieved something. I had broken a deadlock on my own weakness. My own fears. I had confirmed the belief I was finding in myself. I had shown I could, at the very least, put up a fight. That was important. Not only had I seen I had more muscle in me than I thought, I had proven I could use that strength to win. Talk about law of the jungle.

I guess I could have had friends then, at least chosen a couple, but I was beginning to enjoy my isolation, and the best part was, as bad as things got, I found this one thing that I was beginning to see more and more clearly in me: I may have been a loser, I may have been shy and introverted, I may have been badly used, but I never saw myself as a victim.

No, I am absolutely sure of that. I am not sure how it came about, given my childhood, given the isolation of the properties we lived on; but, given that fight and the resistance I put up, it is the reality. And it is one I am grateful for.

To try and bring some logic to it, when I was at primary school, I guess it was all innocence and I was like a tadpole trying to find my way, thinking all the frogs around me knew exactly who they were and what was right and wrong for me. Whereas at high school, as I developed into a young woman, the derision and slander showed me there was something definitely not right with me. It built in me an inner strength – maybe even brought out an innate wisdom – to never allow myself the lethargic, self-destructive luxury of saying: ‘O, woe is me. I am going to sink and drown in my hardships.’

Always I had the feeling I was going to survive. I wanted to survive. Life, for all it had handed out, was, it is hard to find other words, too precious.

By this time, at lower high school, the terrible reality was I already had a “steady” sexual partner – yes, the girls were right –
my Dad
. Father-fucker! Father-fucker! But it never felt bad, well
that
depressingly bad – that I wanted to kill myself or cry away my days until I faded into anorexia or bulimia or suicide.

One of the things I also had to thank for saving me was… the school library. To get away from the other kids, the taunts and teasing, I used to go to the school library during my breaks and read. Just read and read and read.

My speciality was books of woe, tales of tragedy, tales of other people’s loss. They were books written by authors like Eleanor Hibbert along with her pseudonyms, Jean Plaidy, Philippa Carr and Victoria Holt, and others like Susan Griffin who wrote about true-life rape and brutal assaults on women in the 1970s. All of the people in these books had these sad, tragic stories to tell that made mine look, well… like fluff.

Yep, as bad as things got for me, there was always someone worse off. It was in black and white, right here in these books.

The idea of books started coming to me not long after Dad started having sex with me. I’m not sure who suggested I start reading, or if it was the delight I got from discovering The Brothers Grimm, those famous fairy tale volumes that seemed to have no place in our ramshackle, uneducated house, or if it was from the diary Aunty Bev gave me and that I wrote in fastidiously... but one day I went to the school library and these books simply gushed out at me like a rush of cool hose-water.

Some of the books must have been standing up on a table, the librarian’s small way of marketing reading, any reading among us “couldn’t-give-a-damn-about-books” kids. But when I think about it, what may have actually helped me into reading too was a time when Dad actually did read to me from a genuine book.

I had menstruated before I was ten. It was a one-off, and the cycle never returned until I was twelve. Nevertheless, at age ten, I caught such a fright at what I saw that I told Mum and Dad. They must have decided they had to do something about it, because they quickly went out and bought me a book – on sex.

Yes, Mum and Dad bought me an educational book on the female body and sex. Not only that, but they would read to me from it. Dad, who until then had never read to me in his life, whose attitude to reading was –
Put those bloody books away, there’s no need to be doing that. Get your frigging arse down here
– read to me from that book... on menstruation, sex and womanhood.

But the fantasy, the human compassion, the eternal relief I gained from the books in the library at high school lay in this amazing discovery: I was not the only person having it tough on the planet. There was a whole club of people out there, particularly women, who were being so badly brutalised and even destroyed that I probably couldn’t even gain membership to their club if I tried.

Particularly, though, what appealed were the historical novels of Victoria Holt. I could drift into another universe and the world I was taken to always appeared so real to me. More real than my own world. There was other reading material too that were my favourites: booklets about
True Life Crimes and Confessions of Serial Killers
and also Mum’s
Lonely Hearts Club
magazines that made me cry with their stories of heartbreak and pain.

Dad also had this series of “True Crime” booklets. They were given to him by a cousin of his who was some big shot real-life detective in Brisbane. Dad was very proud to know Jonny, as he called him, and would often ask him for advice on things. Though you can bet your life he never whispered a word of what was going on in his own family. Anyway, the thing with these booklets was that they made my experiences with Dad seem like some kind of merely wrong-minded “puppy-love”. A kind of mistakenly soiled rag that could be left behind.

One of the stories I read at the time of Dad’s intrusion into my body, was of a girl around my age who had been raped by her father. Yes,
raped
.
My story was so different. So, so much softer. I had wanted Dad, well I wanted
something
, so technically I left him with no choice. I had pulled him into me. It was a part of my world, my culture.

There was another book that helped me at the time: Alex Haley’s
Roots
. I mean, if I thought I had it rough, just look at the poor slaves in that book. Black folk kidnapped from Africa, raped, treated worse than shit, and murdered by whites in one of the world’s most civilised societies.

The year I first slept with Dad, oblivious to me, to Dad, to Mum, probably to everyone we knew, it was International Women’s Year and untold millions were dying of cruelty and starvation.

I was one of the lucky ones.

The real start of my “fight-back” against Dad began one day when I was about thirteen going on fourteen and in the car with him
. I was in the front seat next to him, and my older brother Jim and younger brother Sam were in the back. We were on our way to Childers, about 200 kilometres away, to visit family friends. And yes, guess what? Neither Mum nor my sister Marge were in the car. Because Mum had gone away again.

Dad, so much the pragmatist, taught us to drive at an early age, and by the time we were barely teenagers we could all drive cars, trucks, even to some extent tractors. One of the ways Dad taught us to drive – and to practice our driving – was by getting us to sit on his lap while he showed us how to steer and how to operate the gears and foot pedals.

I loved driving. It was to me like what going to the movies was for other kids. I loved it, loved it, loved it. There was nothing I would not do to drive.

Dad knew that. And of course one of the conditions under which I could drive, was that while I sat on his lap he could touch me. I didn’t care. I was so used to it anyway. As long as I could drive, that was the main thing. Dad got what he wanted and I got what I wanted.

Only as the hiss of my school friends had taught me, the sex, the touching, the everything that went alongside it, was not what Dad made it out to be. More and more, like the swimming incident in the Nebo River, which left me with a split rectum, I was beginning to let Dad know that I didn’t feel like it.

On this occasion, going to visit friends, with Jim and Sam sitting in the back was no different. Dad asked if I wanted to drive. I knew what that meant. Even with my love for driving, it wasn’t an easy decision. But I decided to stick my neck out and say no. I told him I wasn’t in the mood. Dad knew what I really meant: I wanted to drive all right; I just didn’t want his fingers up my crotch.

‘Get here, now. Come and have a drive,’ he growled at me.

‘No,’ I looked the other away.

‘Get over here now,’ he repeated, and this time pulled at me with his hand.

I shook my head and pulled back.

It was obvious, even to a drunken wombat, I was saying no. Next thing I knew Dad was pulling the car off the road, stopping, and with his long body and brute strength was leaning over, grabbing at my thick wavy hair and smashing my head against the car door-jam. On and on he went, smashing my head like I had committed a heinous crime, like it was the death penalty he was dishing out.

There was no stopping him. He was a man out of control. If it felt bad, it must have looked like murder, because for the first time in my life I heard my brother Jim, usually terrified of Dad, begin to yell with a loud and shaky voice, ‘Stop it! Stop it now! Please, Dad, stop it!’

The amazing thing was, after a few seconds, after Jim’s defiant screams, Dad actually stopped. He let go of my head.

In one way, it was already too late. I had already peed myself. Yes, I sat there and peed right down my legs, but Jim had saved me and Dad didn’t say a word more. I am forever thankful to my older brother for that particular time, when for a moment it seemed like Dad, in front of my brothers, could have rearranged the brain cells in my head, even taking into account that they were already so badly damaged.

But more than that, I saw something else that was happening in me. At the least, I was beginning to let him know I wasn’t always going to be at his beck and call.

I just don’t think they, the kids at school, or anyone really, realised how much courage it took. It was not easy against a man like Dad. Have you ever fought off a lion? Well, that was Dad, in our house, King of the Jungle.

They say men break things and they don’t even know they’re doing it. But I tell you, bad men break things twice as badly. And from where I was sitting on that day, frightened as hell, Dad was looking like a pretty bad man.