by Rosie Batty
Even though I worked assiduously to ensure that Greg knew nothing, he nevertheless began to sense that I was seeing someone. Whether it was a change in my demeanour, or a sense that I had become that little bit more indifferent to his manipulation of me, he began to pepper me with questions via text, which I studiously ignored. The more I ignored him, the more abusive the text messages would become, accusing me of all sorts of depravity and alleging that I was purposefully exposing Luke to immoral behaviour of a most crude kind.
It was a window into how dark his soul was. That a mind was able to conjure such sick flights of fancy spoke volumes for how disturbed it was. But as long as Greg was otherwise adhering to the terms of the IVO, and collecting Luke and dropping him home at the agreed times, I was prepared to simply ignore it.
Perhaps feeling me slip from his grip, Greg resorted to the only control he had over me. It was crude, but effective. During a brief conversation one Sunday afternoon during the handover of Luke, I mentioned to Greg in passing that the time I had each weekend without having to take care of Luke was a godsend in many ways – time for me to get my life back. It was an epiphany for Greg. For six months, he had faithfully shown up to collect Luke and take him overnight, partly because he was his father and he relished the opportunity to spend time with him, but partly also because he believed it was in some way an annoyance to me. Greg lived to make my life miserable.
To discover that a gesture he had hoped was causing me no end of heartache was, in fact, helping me out threw him completely. And so it was time to move the goalposts. Suddenly, Greg started returning with Luke to Menzies Creek hours earlier than he was supposed to. I suspect he was hoping to catch me in the company of someone, which he never did – or at least impact on any arrangements I might otherwise have had. At first, I was happy enough for Luke to be brought home earlier. He was my life, after all, and I missed him terribly on the nights he was away. But after a while, I started to become annoyed with Greg arriving unannounced at my house.
After a month or so of this cat-and-mouse game, Greg finally asked me if I could meet with him for a coffee. We arranged to meet in a café in Knox, not far from Menzies Creek. We sipped our coffees and made awkward small talk until Greg finally got to the point. He told me he had been working hard for the past year, holding down a job, looking after Luke, buying him clothes and toys, because he had been trying to win my approval. Trying to prove to me that he could be a responsible provider and head of a household. I was astounded. All this time I had thought we were comfortably growing apart and developing lives independent of one another, he had been working to try and re-establish our relationship.
He told me he had been headhunted for a job – a promotion from his current role to work with a rival company. He told me all this with an air of anticipation, clearly seeking my praise. But I was too dumbstruck to say anything. Greg had twice been physically violent towards me, had once threatened to kill me and spent part of every day composing vile texts or emails to me. I couldn’t fathom in which universe he thought it might be possible that we would get back together and play happy families.
‘I’m sorry, Greg, but it’s not going to happen,’ I eventually managed to say, careful to deliver the news gently, lest he flare up.
He seemed genuinely deflated by my refusal – deflated and confused. In the recesses of that mind, he had us married off, raising kids and living some sort of suburban idyll. The only thing that stymied his fantasy was the cold-hearted English bitch who couldn’t see what was good for her.
I left my coffee half-finished, made my excuses and beat a hasty retreat, wondering if I had imagined that entire conversation with Greg.
I got home from work that night to discover everything that Greg had bought for Luke in the past ten months in a pile on our doorstep: a car seat, a collection of toys and clothes. It was deliberately provocative, an act infused with such passive aggression that it was terrifying. It was, on his part, a declaration of war. If the past ten months had been relatively calm in terms of tension and hostilities between us, it appeared that the truce had been called off. And so I steeled myself. As it turned out, Greg didn’t see Luke again for eight months or so. He didn’t make contact and travelled overseas.
Luke turned three on 20 June 2005, and I remember the day well. I woke with him next to me in bed. He looked so peaceful – cherubic face, flawless skin, rosebud lips. If there is any experience more wondrous for a parent to watch over their child as he or she sleeps, I don’t know what it might be. In the pre-dawn light, our lives together seemed pretty perfect. Certainly, work was unnecessarily stressful and Greg was a constant thorn in my side, but before sunrise – before any of that workaday messiness began to invade our space – it was just me and my perfect little boy. A special kind of happiness.
Not long after Luke’s third birthday, I received a phone call from Dad in England to tell me he had decided to sell the family farm. I was blindsided by the news. The farm had been in our family for generations and, in a childhood marked by uncertainty, it had been the one constant in my life. The spectre of losing it made me realise just how important an anchor it was. It was my last remaining link to Laneham, and the touchstone of my childhood. It was the house in which all my memories of Mum – such as they were – were contained. It was the house in which I had mourned, grieved and celebrated all of the milestones in my young life.
My grandfather had pioneered the farm. It had been my dad’s entire life. The expectation had always been that it would be passed down the generations. To say that my dad’s decision to sell the farm took me by surprise would be an understatement. Psychologically, the effect of the news was profound. And when it came to the question of staying in Australia or moving back to the UK, it all but sealed the deal.
Until this point, I had kept my options open and a foot in both camps. In fact, when I’d turned forty, a few months before Luke was conceived, I had thought about going back to the UK for good. Everyone close to me was busy raising kids and seemed to be going their separate ways. I had friends here – good friends – but the emotional pull of home had grown stronger and more undeniable with every passing year. I’d been homesick.
And then I’d become pregnant with Luke and something shifted. Suddenly the most important focus in my life lay not in what was behind me but in what was in front of me. What was in front of us. Luke’s arrival had given me a sense of belonging in Australia that I had never previously had. He was my family here and we would build a life here together. We were the two-person Battys-from-Laneham diaspora, the colonial outpost of that proud, little-known farming dynasty from a bend on the River Trent.
After Luke was born, I had never seriously considered going home to England. And, anyway, as I understood it I wasn’t able to go without Greg’s permission. I couldn’t just up and leave – Greg had rights, whether I liked it or not. It was something very few people understood. Often over the years friends would learn of my situation with Greg and with the best of intentions naïvely ask: ‘Why don’t you just move home?’ If only it had been that simple.
When Dad rang to tell me he was selling the farm, he also informed me that I’d receive money from the sale. It was something I had never expected. If there was to be any financial benefit derived from that property, I had always assumed it would go to my brothers and not to me. My three brothers, Robert, James and Terry, had been encouraged to consider their futures as mapped out on the farm. Dad – and indeed my brothers – assumed they would all work on the farm and that a home would be provided to them. As the girl of the family, it was always made clear that was never going to happen to me.
And so, all of a sudden, I had a large sum of money coming my way that would make a huge difference to our lives. But for reasons I couldn’t understand, I was utterly depressed about it. In the fullness of time, I would come to realise that my reaction was perfectly natural – grief in the face of loss. It was a severing of a tie to my past, an irrevocable cutting of the cord
.
I must not have been able to hide my shock, because, when Greg next came to collect Luke, he asked me why I was moping – a rare moment of empathy from him. Without thinking, I told him about Dad’s decision to sell the farm, how he had tried to offset the sting by reminding me how much money I stood to gain from it, but overall how much it had thrown me. I didn’t notice it at the time, but it would become obvious in my subsequent dealings with Greg that the news must have marked him. What he took away was not that I was upset, but that I would soon be in possession of much more disposable income.
As the weeks went by, Greg became more and more convinced that I was seeing someone. I eventually confessed, hopeful that it might encourage him to back off – but it only provoked a new barrage of vile text messages and derogatory comments. The texts were a mixture of contempt and sick imaginings: Greg would delight in accusing me of the most perverted sexual antics, always in lurid detail. He accused me of somehow involving Luke or otherwise exposing him to these antics. It was another insight into his own twisted sexual depravity.
At first the text messages and accusations got me down. I felt dirty and debased. And for the longest time, I engaged with him, trying to reason or argue with him or otherwise defend myself. But responding to the slander only encouraged him, and so I learned to ignore it. Abuse from Greg simply became the wallpaper of my life. Eventually I became desensitised to it, unmoved by even the most outrageous slander on my character. And so the cycle continued.
12
Empowerment
It was 2005, and in a fit of pique one day Greg announced that he had no intention of being a part-time father. He said he never wanted to see Luke again. At first I was distressed – as he knew I would be. Luke loved the time he spent with his father, and, for better or for worse, Greg was his dad so I wanted to facilitate a relationship between them.
Not long after, Greg lost his job. He moved out of his apartment, sold his car and went to stay at the Russian Orthodox monastery for a period. The next contact I had from Greg was a message to inform me that he was heading overseas on some sort of pilgrimage. Israel, Egypt, Peru – it was a typically confused grab bag of destinations, all of which Greg intended to visit to answer a conflicting series of perceived religious callings. I know he funded most of the trip with credit cards, because for months after his return, I had debt collectors calling me asking if I knew of his whereabouts. Midway through his trip, he called me to tell me he had run out of money and would I transfer $2000 into his bank account. Even though I wanted Greg to have a relationship with Luke, I was also keen – for my sanity’s sake – for him to stay away as long as possible, and maybe even never come back. I transferred the money.
By the time Greg returned, eight months later, I had made the decision to leave Menzies Creek. My share from the sale of the family farm meant Luke and I were in a position to move up in the world, to purchase a place where we could settle and I could watch him grow.
After a month or so of searching, I settled on a property in Tyabb, on the Mornington Peninsula. It was, once again, a semi-rural pocket of Victoria, a beautiful patch of the world wedged between Port Phillip Bay and the Western Port. From the property, you could look out across the nearby waters of Western Port to French Island, beyond which lay Phillip Island. Tyabb was close to the townships of Mornington, Somerville and Hastings, both of which boasted all the shops and amenities we could need. It was ten minutes on the freeway from Frankston and fifty minutes – on a good run – on the freeway to the Melbourne CBD.
The house was a 1990s build. Brown brick, two storey, high ceilings, open and light. There was a pool off the back patio, a beautiful garden full of gums and natives, and a large paddock that stretched down a gentle slope. It was perfect. Close by was Tyabb Public School and down the road was Flinders Christian Community College. The moment I saw it, I knew Luke and I would be happy there. And so I made an offer on the house.
Because the IVO had expired, Greg was no longer restricted from coming near me or my property. Aware that I was keen to maintain the barriers the IVO had established, Greg promptly set about testing them, increasing the frequency of his unannounced visits, always picking up and dropping off Luke in hours outside those we had agreed, always hoping to catch me with another man. And each time, there was the confusing combination of abuse and overture. If he wasn’t calling me a slut, he was inviting me to join him for a drink. His behaviour – slander one minute, seduction the next – was too erratic for me to take seriously. I explained patiently each time he invited me that I was not interested, to which he would invariably respond that I was a ‘fucking moron’.
For his birthday in November I sent Greg an email, purportedly from Luke, wishing him a happy birthday. I attached a photo of Greg and Luke together.
Four days later, I received the following response:
I’m disappointed in you Luke. You have become too feminine since I have been overseas … Your mother’s inheritance and since I have known her, continually calling her father for money and that fool giving it, supporting her in her folly rather than relying on your true father. Now with you moving to Tyabb to an overpriced property not even large enough to support a horse is another indication of thoughtlessness and ignorance itself. How I am expected to be more than a two hour amusement once a week only an idiot can explain (ask your mother). To think in the last five months you are now scared of the pool which you weren’t and can still only ride your bike as skilled as I taught you, this shows the manly neglect you have suffered. Your present path you will probably become a homosexual and your mother doesn’t have the right spirit to be concerned of this. There is a lesson to know Luke, no man gets into the bath for amusement with other people’s sons, and when asked to wash your bottom only an idiot wouldn’t be able to see through it. As for this loser [your mother has been seeing], he as a male after two marriages must be proud to disturb others’ lives. If there was an ounce of truth coming from your mother’s mouth she has not shared it with me, the foolish arse blower. Satan’s tricks, and by the look of Vi learnt from her. The violence to your Grandfather would have manifested from Vi, distracting him with violence so not to be able to preserve her truly. Your spirit Luke has a dark hood on your head. It did come off when I saw you but five months away and evil has its glue in your mother’s life. The pleasure your mother got from hearing I had not attended the Mormon Church was an obvious indication of her following an unrighteous path. Your baptism in England was to ensure your mother got some money, it was no indication of her faith. 2 hours once a week Dad.
It is telling how immune I had become to his ramblings that this email didn’t strike me as even remotely unusual. Disturbing and deeply offensive, yes, but unusual, no. Take the tone and nonsensical, abusive content of the above email and multiply it into hundreds of text messages and phone calls, and you start to get a sense of what I was dealing with.
About a week later, and perhaps triggered by the email, I became very depressed. I was midway through the process of selling my property at Menzies Creek and settling on the house at Tyabb. Work was stressful, juggling Luke was exhausting and Greg was constantly abusing me. So when he called one night to launch into a new tirade, I broke down. The thought of him haunting my every waking moment was too much to bear. He had worn me down and I cracked.
‘Enough, Greg, it’s enough,’ I sobbed. ‘I can’t do this anymore. I can’t take it. Just have Luke. Take him. He’s all yours. You can have custody of Luke. I can’t fight anymore.’
There was silence on the other end of the line for a moment.
‘Now, now, Rosie,’ he began. ‘There’s no need to be like that. I’m sorry if you feel that way. And of course I don’t want full custody of Luke. That’s not what I want at all.’
Only years afterwards was I able to understand that full custody of Luke was most definitely not what Greg wanted. He wanted to torture and torment me – and that could only be done if he could use Luke as a pawn.
A month later, and on the eve of our move to Tyabb, I contacted Child Support to cancel Greg’s payment obligations and waive the debts he had accrued. I had never actually received any payments from him for Luke, but I reasoned that relieving him of the obligation to make payments might possibly reduce the level of stress Greg was under, and hopefully reduce the tension that existed between us. It was to be another example of my complete naïveté when it came to Greg.
I had now been working for the telecommunications company for five years, and each year it had only become more stressful. By the time I made the move to Tyabb – significantly further away from my workplace than Menzies Creek had been – I was holding on by a thread to my job, worn down by the physical and emotional toll it had taken. The job I had been doing was coming to a natural end, and the only jobs available in the company involved a lot of travel and even more pressure. I couldn’t have taken them even if I wanted them. Being a single mum in Tyabb with a toddler and working in the CBD were never going to be happy bedfellows. And if I am honest, I made the move there as a way of gently making it impossible for me to continue working in the corporate rat race. I was done.
The inheritance from the farm had given me a small financial cushion, so I used the time to set up Luke’s and my new home. Now that I had acreage in my life, I immediately wanted to fill it with the farm animals that had been such an important part of my own childhood growing up. And so to the goats, chickens and dogs I already had, I added a horse for good measure. My menagerie was complete.
