by Rosie Batty
I fronted up to the café and breezed in. Greg had less hair and his face had a few more lines but he was still the tall, imposing figure he had always been. He was the Greg I remembered, but not quite the same.
When I look back now, knowing what I do, our reunion happened around the time Greg was living with the Hare Krishnas in St Kilda. He was, for all intents and purposes, homeless and without a job. He tried to give me the impression he was on a spiritual path. He mentioned also having spent time exploring the Mormon faith and told me he was involved with a Russian Orthodox monastery near the NSW–Victoria border. It all sounded a bit odd. But he’d always been so quirky, so borderline unusual, that I just took it at face value and didn’t think too much about it.
Greg told me he hadn’t slept with another woman since me. And even though I had left our relationship – such as it was – utterly confused about the sexual side of it, I was nevertheless flattered by this. One of the tenets of his spiritual quest, he would later tell me, was to wean himself off a need for sexual contact with women. In retrospect, who knows whether there was any truth to it.
We talked about old times, and laughed about shared memories. Here he was, calling me McBatty – his nickname for me – again. It felt familiar and, in spite of my better judgement, it felt good. I remembered how he would pick me up and spin me around, and it was a good memory. We reminisced about the work we had done together on my property in Belgrave.
So when he expressed an interest in seeing my new home in Menzies Creek, I invited him back to see it. That afternoon we chopped wood together and made a lovely fire. He seemed to have changed for the better, and appeared to have genuinely realised how much he’d thought about me during the past eight years. I was flattered and intrigued.
And so began a pattern of him reclaiming a place for himself in my life. Just as before, we were never really ‘going out’ in any conventional sense, but he became once again a kind of fixture in my life. He would show up at my place most weekends, and he did a lot of work on the property, clearing brambles, chopping fallen trees, laying sleepers to create a path. He was, it must be said, really good to me in this way.
One weekend, we worked together restoring and repainting an old garden bench that we’d picked up from someone’s throw-out pile. It was a rickety old thing, but it seemed to suit the ramshackle nature of the house – not to mention the ill-defined, slightly odd, but nevertheless vaguely comfortable relationship that was developing between Greg and me.
My property was on a hill, and sometimes I’d look down and see him working on my garden. He was going bald and looked like your average mature middle-aged man. But he still appeared strong and I remember regarding him with a degree of fondness. I was lonely, but now I had someone to help build something at the property. I felt that there was a connection between us.
Sometimes Greg would stay overnight, and sometimes he would go back to where he was living in St Kilda. I even went so far as to buy him a pair of slippers to wear on the nights we would sit in front of the fire, watching the wood we had chopped slowly burn to cinders. There was a sense of rekindling a relationship that hadn’t worked out before, of two kindred spirits who had gotten to a more mature point in their respective lives.
I was thirty-nine years old and in a period of reassessing my life. I didn’t have the same desire and drive to get ahead at work. I’d had years of being all-consumed by my job, but I had lost the passion for that. I remember watching the film High Fidelity, with John Cusack, around that time and really relating to it. It was about a guy about to hit forty taking stock of his life and realising everything he had held up as important ten years previously really didn’t matter in the grand scheme.
And so, in many respects, the reappearance of Greg in my life was just a matter of timing. I hadn’t had a relationship for years. Now I wondered whether I should go back on the Pill, even though I didn’t feel comfortable taking it. But I didn’t want to fall pregnant, either.
When I told Greg this, he protested. ‘I’m not having sex with you if you’re on the Pill,’ he said. ‘It’s not good for you.’ Greg was in the midst of his alternative medicine phase. He was virulently anti-vaccination and thought the Pill – like many modern medicines – was a kind of poison.
Now that I think about it, the fact he was purporting to care about my health, when he had never shown any interest in my welfare before, should have been a red flag.
I was still confused about sex with him, as I had always been. He seemed to put himself on this spiritual pedestal. He had a firm belief that he was spiritually superior – not just to me, but to everyone around him. He truly felt he had complete control over his sexual desire, to the point where, if we did have sex – which happened infrequently – he would control whether or not he came. I often felt rejected because, for the most part, he didn’t want to have sex with me.
I can now see that, for him, sex like everything else was about power and control. And on the odd occasions we did have sex, there was never any suggestion of him satisfying my needs. Once he had gratified himself, that was it. I remember once, after we’d had sex, indicating to him that perhaps I would like to be sexually gratified too. ‘You had your chance,’ he said.
One week, Greg took himself off to Queensland on a spiritual retreat of some kind. When he returned, it was like he was a changed man. He was invigorated in a way I hadn’t seen him for a long time. He was affectionate and attentive, and suddenly very interested in being intimate and wanting to spend a lot of time in the bedroom. I was only too happy to have this normal, loving man in my life – and I thought that whatever issues he’d had he must have resolved. For a day or two, there was a lot of sexual activity between us – a renewed affection, and what I foolishly believed might even have been a new beginning.
I can pinpoint the day that Luke was conceived. And though Greg would never have admitted it, I am now convinced he contrived the whole thing. Years later, he would tell me how he knew from the first time he saw me that I would make an excellent mother for his child.
I don’t mean to say that, from the moment he met me all those years previously, he plotted to impregnate me so I could produce an heir for him, but, looking back, I think his conceiving a baby with me was no accident. The insistence on me not using contraception, the sudden change in mood the weekend he returned from Queensland, the attentiveness, the affection: it was all part of him grooming me for the express purpose of making me fall pregnant with his baby. And, of course, a part of me wanted to be pregnant too. I was almost forty and thought that if it didn’t happen now, maybe it would never happen.
I remember in the following weeks becoming quite sure I was pregnant and feeling uneasy at the prospect. Following a couple of weeks of behaving like a normal human being, Greg had since returned to his hot-headed, unpredictable self. He affected an arrogance and treated me with low-level contempt, reminding me of all the reasons I had pushed him away in the first place.
With a certain amount of trepidation, I bought a home pregnancy test. When it confirmed I was pregnant, I felt mixed emotions. I was carrying Greg’s child and things were weird between us, and while I was pretty certain I wanted a child, I was absolutely certain I didn’t want to co-parent a child with Greg.
And so I started to weigh up my options. I could terminate the pregnancy – and give up what might be my only chance of being a mother. Or go through with it and endure a future in which Greg would always play a significant role. I didn’t know what to do. I went to see Jan to ask her advice. Her son was also visiting and he asked me, ‘Rosie, what did you feel when you found out you were pregnant?’ I thought about it, and I eventually replied I would have been disappointed if the pregnancy test had come back negative. It made me realise that, above all else, I did want a child.
I spoke to my friends and told them about my misgivings, but almost to a person they advised me that, had I not fallen pregnant like this, I would never have had a child. Besides, they said, Gr
eg might technically be the father, but there was nothing stopping me from raising the baby on my own.
I remember telling Leonie – who had never liked Greg. She knew me better than anyone and I valued her opinion. I told her I had never wanted a child up until this point, because I was just so scared that what you love the most in life, you ultimately lose. My life up to that point, I said, had been about avoiding putting myself in a situation where I loved something so much it would break me if I were to lose it. I had spent thirty-odd years protecting myself from those deep-seated feelings of abandonment and rejection. It was why I had never been married, why I had only ever been in self-destructive relationships and why, up until now, I hadn’t had children. For me, the fear of having a child and then losing it was greater than any desire to become a mother.
‘But Rosie,’ she replied, ‘it’s better to have lost in love than never to have loved at all.’ This was probably my one and only chance to know motherhood, Leonie said, and the life-affirming, transformative experience it was. I finally decided she was probably right.
And so, when the time was right, I broke the news to Greg. He could not have been more pleased. It seemed to trigger in him a rush of paternal instinct, and – much to my concern – he set about trying to reinsert himself more permanently in my life. He seemed to want to nest, to prepare the house, to shepherd me through the pregnancy.
I had pretty much decided that I was going to do this on my own. And yet Greg was the father. Shouldn’t he perhaps have some involvement in the pregnancy and rearing of our child?
However, just as I was starting to wonder if there might be some kind of a mutual arrangement between Greg and me, warning signs once again emerged. The first was when we went to a garden centre together in Emerald. Everything was great, we were wandering around looking at plants to buy for my property when, all of a sudden, he turned. It was as if someone had flicked a switch – his mood darkened and suddenly he seemed to be on edge. As we walked back to the car, he started ranting about ‘all these fat people everywhere’ and how disgusting he found them, saying nasty things about how dirty they made him feel and how their presence was offensive to him.
As we were driving home in the car, I challenged him about it. I told him to stop being so judgemental and asked why on earth it should be of any concern to him. All of a sudden he started shouting at the top of his voice. He wasn’t necessarily shouting at me – it was just irrational screaming, a violent outburst of anger. I went really quiet, tried to focus on the road ahead and burst into tears. I was shocked. Who was this man? I couldn’t understand why he had flipped so suddenly – and over something so seemingly inconsequential. I sat there sobbing quietly as I drove.
After a while, he reached out, put his arm around me and apologised.
Afterwards, I tried to analyse it. Why, just as suddenly as he had become angry and irrational, had he returned to his usual rational self? But then life returned to normal, and soon I began to question whether I had remembered it properly – or if it had happened at all. But, somewhere deep inside, my doubt began to fester. A question began to take shape: how well did I really know this person?
Weeks later, I took part in a protest march in the city with a friend. Greg came to collect me afterwards. In the car on the way home, he turned to me, apropos of nothing, and said: ‘Now then, McBatty, should we get married?’
I thought he must be joking and just laughed in response. I was dumbstruck but still not entirely sure he was serious. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ was all I could manage in reply. We had only just rekindled our relationship, we had no security, he didn’t have a job – and I was starting to have worrying doubts about his behaviour and state of mind. And, besides, if he had been serious about proposing marriage, surely he would have had a ring and gone in for something a little more romantic than throwing the question at me as we drove home along the Dandenong Road. So I laughed it off and changed the subject.
I don’t recall Greg being especially surprised by my answer or in any way disappointed. Later, however, I would learn he had been deeply wounded by my rejection, and it was something he would carry with him for a long time. During an access visit with Luke ten years later, he told Luke that I had laughed at him when he asked me to marry him. And I remember Luke berating me afterwards, saying how mean it was of me to react to his dad’s marriage proposal in that way. But at the time, and in context, it was the only feasible reaction.
The morning of 11 September 2001 was something of a benchmark in our relationship, at least from my point of view. A friend phoned me in the middle of the night and told me to turn on the television. I watched, horrified, as the second of the World Trade Center towers came crumbling down in New York.
I yelled at Greg to get out of bed and come and watch. But he ignored me, so I just sat alone in the dark watching the horror unfurl. Greg got up to get a glass of water at some point and saw me in front of the television, clearly upset, and he said, ‘What the fuck are you doing? Get to bed.’
I just figured he hadn’t grasped what was going on. An hour or two later, as I went to bed, exhausted and upset at what I had just seen, I said to him, ‘Do you have any idea what’s just happened?’
‘I don’t give a fuck,’ he said. ‘Just go to sleep. The Americans had it coming to them.’
‘But that was someone’s mother, brother, father, sister,’ I replied. ‘And all they did was go to work. They didn’t deserve that.’
He had no empathy or compassion for the victims. I went to work that day thinking, What are you? How could you not care?
When I got home, he’d obviously registered how upset I was – and no doubt had taken cues from a day’s worth of news reports and seeing the world around him in a state of shock and mourning – so he made a few token comments about how awful it all was. But he didn’t mean it. He didn’t feel a thing. Not a single thing.
And so I started to consciously distance myself from him. Knowing that, with Greg, knowledge was power and power meant control, I learned to drip-feed him information about my life. I was careful not to give too much away. He always wanted to know exactly how much money I was earning, and I made a point of remaining vague about it. Any information he gleaned about me, he would invariably use against me. It was better, I decided, to limit my exposure and vulnerability.
Another red flag was raised not long after when Karena came to visit. Years previously, I had taken part in the Big Brother, Big Sister mentoring program, signing up to mentor a young person from a disadvantaged background. I had been paired with Karena. She was a lovely girl, sweet and good-natured, but deeply scarred after having been abandoned by her mother when she was only thirteen years old. When her mum got a new boyfriend, she suddenly didn’t have room in her life for Karena anymore, so she left her in the care of the local youth centre. By the time Karena came into my life, she had been through several foster homes, none of them very harmonious. For the ten years we had known each other, I had been one of the few constants in a life otherwise filled with uncertainty. I was about as close to her as anyone had ever been.
Karena had made her way to Melbourne and found accommodation in a boarding house, but it was an awful place, so she asked if she could stay with me for a while. I was more than happy to have her.
But the first night, over dinner, Karena was being her cheeky, bubbly self when, out of the blue, Greg’s mood darkened and he threw a couple of books at her across the dinner table, muttering under his breath. He seemed to have taken an instant, irrational dislike to her for reasons I couldn’t fathom. The dislike turned to distrust, and a few days later he told me he was convinced that Karena was looking through his stuff when we weren’t at home. He had these paranoid delusions that she was spying on him.
One morning Karena and I went to the supermarket. As we pulled into the driveway at home, Greg came running out to the car and accused Karena of having locked him out of the house. He was really aggressive, right up in her face, shouting abuse.
I intervened, trying to calm the situation. I didn’t like the way he was talking to Karena and told him so in no uncertain terms. I went inside to take a bath, whereupon Greg barged into the bathroom and started arguing with me about Karena, smacking the wall in frustration. I told him to get out, but when I emerged from the bathroom minutes later Greg was once again laying into Karena, accusing her of all manner of ridiculous things. I told him he had to leave.
Somehow, I managed to coax him into my car so I could drive him to the railway station. He spent the whole journey smacking the dashboard, repeating over and over, ‘Why am I the one who has to leave? Why not her?’ To Greg’s way of thinking, I had chosen Karena over him, and he wasn’t happy about it. Since I had shared with him the news of my pregnancy, he had started to construct a happy family fantasy – an expectation that, despite all of his odd behaviour and our clearly dysfunctional relationship, we were somehow going to be the perfect family unit.
The following day he came back to collect his things. I was at work, but Karena was at home. She stayed in her bedroom, so as not to cross paths with Greg. When I returned that night, she told me how he had come into the house and cut up the slippers I had given him as a present. Then he had gone out into the garden, taken an axe and smashed up the garden bench we had restored together. It was now just a pile of tinder, a terrifying symbol of his strength and anger.
Karena stayed with me for a couple more weeks, until she had to go into hospital. Unbeknown to me, she had become addicted to prescription medicines. I only realised after she had left that every aspirin in my house had disappeared.
Some weeks later, Karena left hospital and found a small house in Belgrave. She agreed to go to Narcotics Anonymous, and I offered to accompany her. She was determined to turn her life around – or at least that’s how it appeared from the outside.
