A Mother's Story

by Rosie Batty

  The following weekend, I had a trip planned to Sorrento with a girlfriend who Greg had decided he didn’t like, and he made sure I was aware of his displeasure. But I wasn’t about to let anyone tell me who I could or couldn’t spend time with, and so I went. When I returned, he was really off-hand with me, acting aloof and indifferent. I challenged him, saying, ‘Either you’re being like this because you’re seeing someone else or you don’t want to see me anymore.’

  He promptly replied that he was seeing someone else, alluding to the fact that she was some sort of sex goddess. I was hurt, because he’d lashed out and wounded me in the one part of my life he knew I was especially sensitive.

  I don’t know if it was because I had lost my mum at six and never really had a role model for relations with members of the opposite sex, but I had never been totally at ease – or especially confident – about sex. I remember being fourteen years old and having boys wanting to kiss me or hold my hand, and I always pushed them away. My nickname in the village among boys of a certain age was ‘untouchable’. In that sense, my being sent to boarding school was quite a relief, because I didn’t have to deal with any of that stuff.

  And so when Greg sought to hurt me with that comment – the truth of which was anyone’s guess – I thought to myself, he can go and get stuffed. I had spent all those years in a small village dealing with abandonment and rejection issues, always being especially careful of giving too much of myself away for fear of being rebuffed, and here was Greg repaying the trust I had begun to place in him by treating me like dirt.

  Looking back now, it was the first really obvious sign of his need for power and control in a relationship – two qualities that would go on to become a hallmark of all our interactions. But, of course, I didn’t recognise it at the time.

  5

  Isolation

  Later in 1992 I moved into my new place in Belgrave, out to the east of Melbourne. It’s a beautiful part of the world – famous as the home of the Puffing Billy steam engine. Perched on the edge of the Dandenong Ranges National Park, it’s green and covered in bushland. It was, I had decided, the perfect bolthole for a girl from the country: close enough to commute to work in the CBD and just far enough away to feel like I was out in the country.

  My house was a little run-down shack of a place – no more than a wooden cottage in the hills. At the time, I was just excited at how much land I was able to purchase for the same amount it would have cost to purchase a shoebox in Richmond, which had been my alternative option. Nottinghamshire, from whence I had come, is really flat and mostly featureless. The Dandenongs by comparison are undulating and covered in the most gloriously unkempt bushland and forest.

  But from the moment I moved in I was miserable. I soon came to hate the house and I started to feel increasingly lonely. I now lived a long way from my friends, and there were no close neighbours.

  The financial pressure of the mortgage, combined with an increasingly precarious work environment, made me anxious as I had never been before. I had a job I was struggling to master and a work environment that was not particularly nurturing. I would return to my shack at night, close the door against the winter cold and think about how much I missed my family.

  I became very distressed by the number of people being summarily dismissed at work and was convinced I was on the chopping block, so I worked even harder. Selling a service, as it turns out, is really difficult. Having to cold-call companies that have no desire to speak to you can be soul-destroying. I was way outside my comfort zone. Sales, I have since come to understand, is not a great profession for someone who has issues with rejection. I nevertheless stuck it out at the recruitment company for almost three years. Those of us who survived – and I use that word deliberately – developed a kind of ‘in the trenches’ mentality, but none of us left there without scars.

  I remember going to someone’s leaving lunch and feeling so anxious I couldn’t sit through the meal. A friend who knew me well suggested I go see a doctor, who promptly informed me the three most common triggers for stress and anxiety are money worries, men trouble and job insecurity. I had hit the trifecta.

  Meanwhile out at Belgrave, I had embarked upon a pet-accumulation spree in an effort to introduce some companions into my life. And so the household grew with the acquisition of Gordon the Brittany spaniel, Lola the springer spaniel and two cats, William and Henry. Their ranks were soon bolstered by the arrival of a goat called Gilbert and a sheep called Rodney. They all did their darnedest to keep me company, but I was still too young to become a confirmed cat spinster, so I took in a lodger to help with rent and provide a bit of human company. Mark was the brother of one of my neighbours, a really nice bloke who liked to keep to himself. We became good friends.

  It was around this time that Greg started making impromptu house calls. Since the time he’d hurt me, I had never allowed things between us to escalate beyond a vague friendship. He had gotten the sack months earlier, because he was consistently missing sales targets, though, if you asked him, he was the greatest salesman in the world and solely responsible for landing the biggest deal in the company. He was deluded like that.

  The house calls started on weekends. He would appear unannounced and offer to help out in the yard – taking to the undergrowth with the whipper-snipper, moving logs, you name it. I was wary but happy to see a familiar face. And being on my own with a vast yard and expanding menagerie to manage, I was grateful for the extra set of helping hands. On the odd Saturday night, Greg would stay over, always sleeping in the spare room. He would often joke to Mark and me what a perfect couple we made, and loudly predict that we would end up together. It was all very jocular, and to my mind, at least, spoke to the possibility of Greg and I having a perfectly normal platonic friendship. I think he genuinely liked me but, in retrospect, part of his attraction to me lay in the fact that he saw me as vulnerable and easy to manipulate.

  One evening I got a phone call from Greg saying he had to move out of his house and could he stay with me. I felt sorry for him and was so lonely, I said yes. And so, for what would be the first of many times, Greg moved in.

  Greg had an arrogance about him that I found offensive. He took a keen interest in alternative medicine and there were always pots of Chinese herbs bubbling away on the stove, stinking the house out. I started to notice the books he was reading – most of them about Eastern philosophy and religion. I’m not sure that he ever read a complete book. He would read a chapter here and a chapter there and cherry-pick from each of them the bits he liked the sound of.

  That first time he stayed at my place for about ten months. As time went by, we found ourselves in a sort of relationship. He was quite removed and didn’t have a lot of friends. He would have a job for a few weeks here and there, but they never lasted. He never seem fazed when he lost a job, and was always ready to blame the company or a colleague rather than admit any shortcomings of his own. Greg was always good at paying bills and making a financial contribution to the running of the household. Despite his frequently stated conviction that Mark and I were a match made in heaven, Greg and I were intimate on and off. It was always random, and never seemed especially meaningful for either of us.

  I began to see a pattern emerge in our relationship (if indeed you could have called it that). If he thought I wasn’t interested in him, he made an effort to engage with me. If I showed interest in him, he would pull back and become aloof.

  We kept separate bedrooms, and I made a conscious effort to keep things between us as casual as possible. It was only after a trip back to England later that year that I realised how much living with Greg was dragging me down.

  I had left Greg with the use of my car and care of the animals. Back in England, I spent a solid few weeks in the company of my younger brother James, visiting a succession of local pubs and essentially letting my hair down. The pressure of work, the mortgage, the uncertainty around my relationship with Greg – it had all built up without my realising. And ba
ck in the bosom of my family, I felt finally able to let go. It also afforded me some much-needed perspective. I accepted that I needed to make changes in my life, and the two things I needed to do most urgently were to get out of the recruitment company and get rid of Greg.

  I returned to Australia with a sense of resolve. I quit my job and soon after found a new gig with a major computer company – one that would prove to be both challenging and rewarding.

  Getting rid of Greg was not so straightforward. He had become very comfortable at my house, driving my car and using all my things. He was not disposed to being turfed out, and he made his feelings clear. He had developed a sense of entitlement that was hard to crack – no matter how many hints I dropped about him needing to find somewhere else to live. I remember Mark saying, ‘He’s dragging you down, Rosie. You came back from England in a really good place, but with every day that passes and he’s still here, he’s eroding your confidence.’ Mark was right, but the thing about being undermined on an almost daily basis is that when finally you find the resolve to do something about it, you don’t have the confidence to see it through.

  One evening, a mutual friend of Greg’s and mine came to visit me. Greg was out for the night. She listened to me talk about Greg and how I felt confused and somehow at fault for creating my situation. And she said, ‘Rosie, this is not your fault. You’re not to blame. I have to tell you something. Greg tried to rape me in my house. I had to fight him off. I don’t want you to tell anyone. It’s important, though, that you know.’

  I was horrified. My friend was a confident, assertive woman and he had tried to sexually assault her. And here she was embarrassed to report the attack for fear of being blamed for having somehow incited it. Whatever had happened on that night, she said, she ended up having to talk Greg down. Something had seemed to switch in his personality and she realised she didn’t really know who this person was or what he was capable of.

  Suddenly Greg’s behaviour over the previous ten months was cast in a new and sinister light. Sex between us – on the odd occasions it had occurred – had always been confusing. His behaviour towards me sexually was nothing short of deviant. In many instances I would wake up in the middle of the night and find him having sex with me, having let himself into my room and bed. I would be too shocked to do or say anything, and he would gratify himself and then leave. For reasons I still don’t really understand today, I never considered it rape. I think I was just so confused by him and this ill-defined relationship we had. He didn’t ostensibly force me to have sex with him, but it was all just so furtive and abnormal.

  Talking to my friend that night, something in me snapped and I thought, you bastard! I was furious with him – and with myself. It made me realise the emotional and physical abuse to which he had been subjecting me, and I resolved to cut him out of my life.

  Later that evening, Greg tried to come into my bedroom. I told him to fuck off and make plans to leave my house immediately. ‘If you don’t leave,’ I told him, ‘I will be calling the police to have you removed.’

  He sensed that something had shifted in me and backed off instinctively.

  That weekend I went away with friends for a couple of days. I returned to find Greg gone. He had taken everything he owned and only left behind two gifts I had given him: a mug and a souvenir from England.

  With Greg excised from my life, I felt a huge sense of relief – a lightness. I began kicking goals on the work front and my reputation for excellence grew. Eventually, I moved to another computer company into what would become the best job I have ever had. As a business development representative, I looked after major channels, including Harvey Norman and Myer. The job required me to travel extensively and, in turn, meant the sense of isolation I felt living at Belgrave was significantly reduced. I was happily single and in something of a purple patch.

  When I was offered a promotion, I was ecstatic. When it became clear the new job would be based in Sydney, though, I was hesitant. It was 1995 and I had just spent the better part of the last decade getting myself established in Melbourne. All my friends were there, my home, my network. But it was an opportunity too good to refuse, and so I packed up my life, sold my property in Belgrave, and headed north.

  At first, the bright lights of Sydney were intoxicating. I loved the harbour city – I loved its energy and I loved the opportunity to explore a brand-new town. The dogs and I set ourselves up in Castle Hill, on the Sydney’s north-western outskirts. My new workplace was in Lane Cove. True to Sydney form, I took up daily exercise with a vengeance, waking every morning at five-thirty with the dogs.

  The new job – my first in a management position – was demanding. It was not uncommon to turn in fourteen-hour days, leaving the office sometimes at 10 pm. The office environment was relentlessly competitive – which could have been good were it not for the fact it was a bit of a boys’ club and I was the only woman. The discrimination was never overt. It was made up of simple things, such as all the male managers – my colleagues – going for lunches and forgetting to invite me, or playing golf together and never thinking to include me. I see it now for the workplace discrimination it was but, at the time, it dented the self-confidence of a girl who had never really dealt with her rejection and abandonment issues.

  Nevertheless, I threw myself into my job, determined to prove my worth. But it was all to no end. The division I was in was earmarked for restructuring and I was one of the first to be retrenched. I had given my heart and soul to that job only to be escorted from the premises with a box full of personal effects.

  I went to bed for three days and didn’t get up. I had given everything to that job to the exclusion of all else in my life. I had moved to Sydney, left behind friends and lived and breathed the role. I had allowed my sense of self-worth to be defined by the job, and now I didn’t have it anymore. I felt desolate and so very alone. I understood for the first time why people commit suicide. I thought I was a failure.

  I picked myself up and, a month or so later, I got a great new job working for another computer company. My self-esteem and confidence returned.

  But eventually a turning point came when I returned to Melbourne one weekend for Leonie’s wedding. There, in one room of nuptial-inspired bonhomie, was everything I had been missing in Sydney. These were my friends and I realised how much I needed to be near them.

  I made a checklist of the pros and cons of another move. Having sold my Belgrave property when I moved north, I had prevaricated and hadn’t invested the money straight into a property in Sydney. Now the market had moved on and I’d missed the boat. The only place I could afford to buy was on the Central Coast, more than an hour’s drive north of Sydney. A quick scout of the Melbourne market showed me there were homes available, in my price range, within striking distance of all my friends. In all my time in Sydney I had never really put down roots. I decided to head back south.

  6

  Turning Point

  During my online real-estate fossicking while still living in Sydney, I had come across a property in Menzies Creek, a tiny township in the Dandenong region not far from where I had previously lived in Belgrave. I asked my former Belgrave neighbours to give it the once-over, and they came back with generally positive reviews. I bought it, sight unseen.

  When I arrived to see it for myself a few weeks later, it was ten-thirty at night. I loved the place. It was essentially a log cabin with pine-panelled interiors. I thought it was rustic and charming, and a perfect antidote to my three years of city living in Sydney. I sat in the empty living room, opened a bottle of wine and had a toast to whatever lay ahead with my old neighbour, Carrie, and friend Chris, who had brought my furniture from Sydney. The next morning, I returned to see it for the first time in daylight and it was even more spectacular. Nestled in the midst of dense eucalypt forest, with ferns and bracken in the thick undergrowth, it was rugged and private. My own little bush hideaway in the mountains.

  Not long after my return to Melbourne, I
landed a job with a trade marketing company in St Kilda. The commute – some 50 kilometres each way – was manageable at first, but soon became tiresome. The more hours I spent at work or on my commute, the fewer hours I had to maintain my house and property. So I left my job for a role as a sales representative with a telecommunications company, which, I figured, would at least cut out the daily commute to an office.

  The decision to move back to Melbourne had been motivated by a desire to be back in the circle of friends I had known for over a decade. What I hadn’t taken into account was the fact that, during the three years I had been in Sydney, most of them had married and had children. I had come back to rejoin the tight-knit Melbourne crew that had once nurtured me, but that crew no longer existed. Or if it did, its members were all busy changing nappies.

  Out of the blue one day, a friend called me. ‘You’ll never guess who I just bumped into in the city,’ she said.

  ‘Greg Anderson?’ I guessed, without knowing why.

  ‘Yes! How did you guess?’ she replied. ‘And he asked me all about you. Whether you were married, whether you had children.’

  Almost eight years had passed since I’d seen Greg and we’d had no contact at all in that time. I was bemused that he would ask after me. What would he look like? Would he have met someone and married like everyone else? Was he still the arrogant tosser I had thrown from my house all those years ago?

  The intense anger I had felt towards him had faded over the last eight years, and I was intrigued to catch up and see him. What harm could it do to meet for coffee? So I called Greg and we organised to meet in the city. Coming back to Melbourne had given me the perspective necessary to reflect on my time in Sydney, and I felt good going in to meet Greg, thinking about how I’d lived independently and built on my career up there, despite the way things had ended.