A surge of terror washes through her body. Now tears come, salt against her lips. Stupid, stupid, stupid girl! she tells herself. You’re going to die out here all alone. Will Mama and Papa cry when they find you dead? Or will they just hate you for running away? Monika pictures her grave in the blackened bush, an ash pile smothered in pink flannel flowers; they are the prettiest and rarest of the flannel flowers, Uncle Mel told her, and they only come to life after a bushfire.
The grizzling of a baby, somewhere outside, brought Monika back. The breeze, billowing the curtains at her bedside, rattled the daffodil stalks still tied with twine in the cloudy water of a jar on her table. Who brought those? The almoner would be here again soon. To talk. Talk, talk, talk. She was so tired of talking.
When she began feeling sick and knew for certain she must be pregnant, she had just wanted it to all go away. She knew the instant she let her secret out into the world, the silence would be shattered forever. And who could she tell? There was only one person she could trust. Monika knew the shame unmarried mothers brought on their families. When Maggie fell pregnant last year, the Boselys had tried to avoid becoming outcasts by sending her off to a maternity home in Victoria. She had still not returned. Those who knew the truth blamed them for raising ‘a bad girl’. Dated a Yank, they say. Always knew she was trouble, that one.
Laura cried gently and hugged her tight. But she didn’t play her role as ‘distraught mother’ quite the way Monika had hoped. She was meant to be outraged. Stupid girl! My God, you’re only sixteen! You’re throwing your life away! She was meant to put her foot down and insist they get rid of the baby. Monika had rehearsed it all in her head. She realised this was what she herself wanted. Laura was heartbroken but she did not sound angry. Just tired.
‘Do you love him?’ she asked.
‘Yes, but . . .’ Monika looked away. Brün was such a very beautiful young man. Her Wagnerian knight who loved Beethoven and Brahms, played the piano a little and still struggled with his English. The real problem was he had no ambitions beyond his father’s brewery and a quiet life in the mountains. Monika knew she wanted more, much more. ‘Yes, but . . .’ was as good as a confession that she did not love Brün enough to throw away her hopes for a different future.
Laura nodded. She understood.
‘Well, we don’t have many choices,’ said Laura. ‘If you don’t want to marry Brün, then you face a very hard life as an unwed mother. Unless . . .’
Monika wanted to shout at her the monstrous truth in her heart: Don’t you get it? I don’t want the baby! Make it go away! Please! She knew it wasn’t that simple. This was not one of those fairytales where women handed over their children to witches or dwarves to fulfil a bargain or prevent a curse. This was brute reality. There was the life of a human being at stake.
Laura spoke. ‘There is one possibility. I could raise the child as my own. A change-of-life baby. Not uncommon even in the mid-forties. The child need never know. It would have a perfectly good life and avoid the stigma of illegitimacy.’
Monika did not know what to think. She could never imagine her father agreeing. It was a pretty threadbare disguise for a bastard pregnancy, she thought: doomed to failure if it was meant to protect the Foxes from gossip. ‘I – I’ll think about it,’ Monika mumbled, burying her face in her mother’s shoulder and weeping until she thought her heart would break.
Adam had moved out to the cottage, his usual refuge, for a short while after the incident of the axed desk and the gun. The gun had not been loaded, of course, but that did not change the fact that a line had been crossed. Adam had dropped the axe, crashed to his knees like a wounded bull and shuddered with deep sobs in the arms of his wife. ‘Please, please forgive me.’ Monika would never forget the sight of her father’s face distorted with shame and desolation and the sound of her mother’s voice – ‘It’s alright, my love, it’s alright’ – over and over. She did not know who she hated the most that day for frightening Lottie and Alan so badly and forcing her to resort to such a desperate course. She had flung the gun aside, packed her bags and caught the next train back to Darling Point, taking Lottie and Alan with her and leaving her parents to sort out their own tortured lives.
Adam had begged his children’s forgiveness but soon resumed the mantle of the family patriarch as if nothing had changed. When Laura explained Monika’s situation, he stormed up and down the hallway, shouting. Pregnant to a German brewer’s son, for crying out loud! He would call the police and charge the boy with ‘carnal knowledge’, threaten the Fabers with lawyers, cut off their contract to the hotel, get their business boycotted all over the district.
‘Yes, that’s brilliant. Let’s take out a big advertisement in the newspaper too while we’re at it! It’s better if the boy – and his family – never know,’ counselled Laura.
Adam calmed down and decided it was time to involve the expert advice of the family’s doctor, solicitor and priest. Any decision about Monika’s future was to be taken out of the hands of the Fox women – what would they know of these matters, after all? – and put into the competent hands of professional men.
The paramount consideration was secrecy, urged all three professionals, and the easiest, quickest and least painful solution was a ‘closed adoption’. As a result, it was decided that, in the last six months or so of her pregnancy, Monika would be sent away to the Benedict Street Maternity Home in Sydney, operated by the Catholic Church. Here, she would board with thirty-six other unmarried mothers, hidden from public scrutiny until her baby was delivered and put up for adoption through Martin Street Maternity Hospital. All done with discretion and care.
It was clear to both Monika and her mother that this plan to exile her from the family was intended as a punishment. Laura tried to explain to Adam the cruelty of his decision but he refused to listen. She realised that this was a test of her loyalty and love after the recent crisis. She would have to sacrifice Monika and Monika’s unborn child to save her marriage – or so she told herself.
Monika was surprisingly stoic. At least her father and his male experts had made the dreadful decision for her. She had survived the strictures of Osborne College and she would survive this. In six months’ time the nightmare would be over.
She missed Brün so much: her lips, breasts, body still ached for his touch. Tears spilled from her eyes when she lay in bed and thought of their final parting. She had sent him a letter: ‘Ours is an impossible love and cannot continue, my brave Bear. We are so young and from such different worlds. I know you will find happiness again. I promise I will never forget you, Brün.’ It was a good letter, she thought, melodramatic and self-aggrandising as all such letters should be.
Brün came to the house in Jersey Avenue one night soon after and threw gravel at her bedroom window. ‘We can go away. Just you and me. No one can tell us how to live.’
Again her father spared her the agony of making a decision, storming out of the house and yelling, ‘She does not want to see you. Come here again and I will ruin your father’s business, do you understand? This is my final warning!’
For six months she endured the stern solicitude of the nuns at Benedict Street Maternity Home. Some were kinder than others but the general mission was clear: to shepherd the souls of the poor women who had fallen into sin down the path of redemption. It was like school all over again but even lonelier. Monika had never thought she would pine for Lottie’s company so much.
The Benedict Street girls were addressed only by their first names in order to protect their privacy. There were few opportunities during the day for private conversation anyway as they were all expected to perform ‘light duties’, including shifts in the kitchen, the office and the nursery, as part-payment for their board. Given her father’s wealth, this was absurd and decidedly a punishment in Monika’s case. It was made very clear that she was to receive no ‘special treatment’.
The afternoons were given over to chapel and then cookery, craft, and gardening classes. Idle hands are the
devil’s tools. While chopping food, sewing, weeding, and washing and ironing bed linen were onerous enough, it was the time spent in the nursery that was by far the worst of Monika’s tasks. From the day she arrived, Monika had made a firm decision to give her child up for adoption, so she could not understand why the nuns tormented her by forcing her to care for other women’s babies in the nursery.
Except for distant memories of her baby brother, Alan, Monika was unfamiliar with babies. These defenceless creatures gurgled, cooed, smiled and ogled her from their cribs. She was shocked at how very small they were: such tiny pink hands with fingers that wiggled like the soft horns of snails probing the air; chests as fragile as those of little birds that shuddered with each breath; eyes that drank in the world with a permanent gaze of wonderment. How was this meant to help stiffen her resolve to give up her child? It was cruel and perverse.
As she felt the stirrings of her own unborn child within her, that firm resolve began to flag even more. The sisters were well-practised at detecting these moments of morose fixation and they swooped down to shore up weak wills. Every day, the company of girls was ushered into the chapel where the sisters gently berated them for their sinfulness before offering the salve of Jesus’s love and mercy, followed by a hymn or two to the whine of the harmonium.
Every week, the almoner, Mrs Richards from the Child Welfare Department, visited with her own government-approved version of salvation to counsel Monika about adoption. ‘I have many good families waiting to give a new life to illegitimate babies like yours. The adoption of these babies removes the legal stigma of illegitimacy. It legitimises these babies’ births again. If you truly love your child, you will give it the opportunity for a fresh start and the chance to grow up in a good family with a mother and father.’ Just as baptism washed babies free of sin, adoption would wipe away the stain of illegitimacy.
All this talk had the opposite effect to that intended. By the last month of her pregnancy, nothing could stop or change the building storm of emotions that had taken hold of Monika during her period of confinement at Benedict Street. It was a combination of growing defiance against the insistent brainwashing she endured and the softening of the boundaries between her own self and the mysterious but unmistakeably present other person inside her.
She suffered through lower back pain, dizziness, high blood pressure, nausea, loss of appetite, skin rashes, pimples and hot flushes. Her hips unlocked and her back unhinged, leaving her feeling unstable and vulnerable. She avoided mirrors but felt unsightly and ridiculous some days and expansive and glorious on others. Her belly swelled so big and taut it was hard to find a comfortable position in which to sit or lie. As she read on her side in bed, she felt her baby stirring and saw her flesh ripple with the imprint of a hand or foot.
Was she still confident she could surrender this child to someone else so easily? Monika was haunted by the thought of that moment of surrender as she stroked her taut belly, imagining she was cradling the head of her child. The sisters forbade the girls to give their baby a name. They could reprimand her for saying a name out loud, perhaps, but they could not stop her thinking it. Her secret name. Rosie.
Visitors were screened by the sisters and confined to the immediate family. Adam or Laura visited but never together. Papa was brisk and businesslike, fiddling with his hat nervously in his lap. He came bearing gifts of books and sweets to assuage his guilt and ended each visit with a tender peck on her forehead. One day, leaning over, he whispered, ‘My clever girl. You have such a bright future ahead of you. So much to achieve. I hope you’ll forgive me. Some day.’
Laura came bearing fruit baskets, flowers and Mr Allsorts, Monz’s golliwog from when she was little. She found it hard to hide her anger from the sisters, though Monika begged her not to make her time here any harder. She clung to Monika when the visit ended, stifling her sobs with difficulty. It seemed the nuns had a word with Adam, because Laura did not come again for the last two months.
To her surprise, the only person in whom Monika could confide without fear of judgement, advice or emotion was Lottie. Her big sister brought her gossip and magazines, chocolates and cheeriness. It was to Lottie she told the secret name. It was to Lottie she confessed: ‘I think I have fallen in love with my little Rosie.’
Her breasts had swollen too and her nipples leaked milk. In the last week before her due date, she was sent to the single mothers’ ward at Martin Street Maternity. She was surrounded by sullen, silent women, all about her own age. A young doctor came and wrote in her file, marked B.F.A. – Baby For Adoption – even though Monika had not yet signed any consent forms. Dr Stevens did not look much older than her, maybe early twenties, anaemic, thin, aloof. She heard one nurse refer to him as an intern. He patted her here and there, wrote up her notes, and started her on a daily regime of pills and needles. Her wrists were strapped with thongs to the bed rails and she was injected two, sometimes three, times a day. She saw the names on the bottles but no one explained what they were for. Amytal Sodium. Nembutal. DES. Her breasts stopped leaking. She felt odd, disoriented, trapped in a blurry torpor, and as the hours dragged slowly by, she lapsed into bouts of dreamless sleep.
When the day finally arrived, Monika did not know Lottie was outside in the waiting room, refused entry ‘so as not to cause the patient any distress’. Monika’s head felt cloudy, heavy. Her temples throbbed. She felt the spasms in her uterus coming closer and closer together, grinding her up in relentless waves of pain. How would she ever get through this birth?
She was trolleyed into the labour ward on her back, a drip in her arm. The hastily tied, thin cotton gown flapped open. The lights were too bright. The room was cold. White tiles like a butcher’s shop. The nurses made no eye contact. Their mouths were covered with masks. They offered no kind or reassuring words.
Monika felt scared now. And so sad. Wasn’t birth supposed to be something special, sacred? This was all so impersonal, so clinical, so rushed. Where was Laura? Why did she not come? Why did nobody hold her hand? The pain was crushing all the breath out of her. She cried out. ‘Shut up! Silly girl!’ An older woman, stern-faced.
A bedsheet blocked her view of the birth itself. All she could feel was the surging tide of the contractions and the pressure of her baby’s head. On and on and on and on. And then the moment of release. She heard a baby’s cry. A sob escaped her own mouth.
‘What is it? A girl or boy?’ she whimpered. But nobody heard her. There was the bang of a door and the sound of the newborn’s cries receding into the distance. The neon lights overhead were extinguished. ‘All done!’ a nurse announced brightly. Monika felt the sting of a needle in her arm. ‘You won’t remember a thing!’
And Monika slipped into a dark, empty place.
At the bottom of the narrow trail she finds a creek. The drought has reduced it to a trickle but it still runs clean and Monika scoops up its water greedily. It has no particular flavour so she knows it is safe. Her lips are healed, her throat slaked. You will live! says a voice inside her head. She follows this trickle to a larger creek, running fast but shallow. She drinks again and splashes across to the further bank. She must find some shelter from the sun soon. Her skin burns and her eyes itch. Monika hobbles up the far side of the creek and follows the trail along the cliff line. She ducks under a log and sees a hole cut into the side of the sandstone cliff face. It is the low entrance to an abandoned coal mine.
Maybe she can rest here. The walls are slimy and overgrown with lichen and ferns. She sees frozen drips of orange wax – stalactites – suspended from the ceiling. She peers inside but it gets dark only a short way in and she can hear hundreds of creatures rustling about. One of them alights on her bare foot, a big, brown, cave cricket. She shrieks and shakes it off.
She must sit down soon as she can barely keep the weight on her sprained left ankle. She looks across the valley to where the golden afternoon light is retreating up the cliffs. Bruises of blue-grey storm cloud spread across the pale flesh of
the sky. If only these clouds would drop their cargo of rain, she would no longer be in any danger from the fire. She stumbles on a while longer, following the trail that hugs the cliff face. As she rounds a corner, she sees a hole in the thick foliage: a doorway made of bricks. It is like something from one of her mother’s fairytales and looks completely out of place here in the rugged scrub of Asgard Plateau.
It must be a goblin’s hut, thinks Monika. The hut is overgrown with vines, bushes and clumps of grass. Monika peers inside. Satisfied it is safe, she crawls on her hands and knees through the arched doorway. There are no crickets here, no slime or ferns or stalactites. Inside is a small, domed room, lined with bricks from the floor to the round skylight in its roof. Monika is surprised at how clean it appears; she imagines a short bearded fellow with a broom giving it a good sweep out. She has no idea it is a coke kiln built by coal miners many years ago. To a little girl lost in the bush, it is a miracle.
Monika takes her Mary Janes and her balled-up socks out of her pockets and arranges them near the doorway, making house. She presses her swollen, discoloured ankle against the smooth brick lining of the room. The coolness is a balm.
Birds are starting to fall silent now as the copper-pink light of dusk slides up the cliff faces opposite. And then, unexpectedly, she hears a medley of bird calls in quick succession: the staccato cackle of a kookaburra, the long liquid flute-note and snap of a whipbird, the swooping throaty carol of a currawong and the squeaky chirrups and tinkling of a crimson rosella. These calls ring out over the valley with the clarity of church bells, each run of notes dropping into the still air of the long dusk like pebbles dropped into silver water.
Monika crawls to the door to listen. She knows what this is. A superb lyrebird, a male, is giving his evening concert, showing off his mastery as a mimic of every sound in the bush. Her heart skips to a lighter beat to hear such beauty. It feels as if he is performing just for her.
Palace of Tears Page 35
