Snake Circle

by Roberta Sykes

  Interspersed with the information he gave me about himself and his family, he tried to prise personal details out of me. How come a young woman like me was working at the Health Commission? Didn’t I have a husband who would keep me? Did I have children? And finally, would I be interested in marrying him?

  I had not broached the most poignant and critical of the allegations that his children had made against him—that he had tried to force himself upon his daughter when she came home and he had called her a slut. But his ready and very unapologetic admissions had already caused me to despair about the likely success of putting the family back together through any of the helping agencies I knew to exist. The father appeared not only reconciled to the fact that his three oldest children had left him, but happy to be rid of the responsibility of them and get on with his own life.

  I made time to go to the hospital to visit his daughter. I had told him that she had had surgery and was in hospital, but he had not even asked which hospital she was in. I was informed by the nurses that the girl had so many drugs in her system that the medications they gave her to lessen her pain weren’t working. I peeped around the door and she appeared to be sleeping, so I didn’t disturb her, leaving the few gifts I had brought with the duty nurse. When I next rang, I learned she had signed herself out and staff had no idea where she was.

  Meanwhile, her brother stayed quietly over at my house, spending his days mainly doing odd-jobs in the yard and, I hoped, reflecting on his life. He took a bus into the city once or twice, but was always back by nightfall. On his birthday, I made a cake and we celebrated the event. Afterwards, when we were alone, I told him that he was now at liberty to leave and unless he got up to mischief, the police were unlikely to be able to detain him. He was now old enough to get himself on the unemployment register and look for work, even apply for the dole.

  While I was telling him his rights, he began to plead with me to allow him to stay. He would even go back to school, if he could go to the same school as Russel. I was surprised because, after that first night, Russel had been dismissive towards him and they hadn’t spent much time together. I looked about me, our house so small, dark and tiny, the boy had slept on the floor, and I recognised that, despite my wish to help him, I couldn’t. My life was hard enough—I could not acquiesce to his pleas.

  I took him into town the next day, and found his brother. Then I sat them both down and gave them a good talking to about being at the crossroads and offered what small back-up assistance I could, and did not see either of them from that day.

  Christine mentioned that she had seen one of the brothers again. But after that they had disappeared out of our lives, as people often do. In banter, I asked Christine not to talk to girls in coffee shops, even if they were sobbing buckets. And if she did, she was not to call me.

  Another wonderful soul who rose up out of my past was Phillip Pearce, whom I had met while working at Lowths Hotel in Townsville. Phillip had been a casual waiter at functions, his full-time job was working in a hair-dressing salon in Flinders Street, then the centre of town. He had given Naomi her first haircut. Before he began to trim her fair locks he had carefully snipped off a curl, tied it together with a thin ribbon and given it to me as a memento.

  In Townsville, he had been a pleasant and thoughtful young man, quite shy and withdrawn. When I met him again, though, he had become a very confident man, co-owner and operator of an upmarket hair salon in trendy Oxford Street, Paddington. He had not known he was gay in the old days in Townsville, he confided, and realising and acknowledging his orientation had allowed him to be his full self. He was in a monogamous and loving relationship with his partner who worked with him at the salon.

  Over the years since I had met Phillip, I allowed my hair to sprout and only cut it down once a year, at the beginning of summer, to save money. Sometimes it grew to extravagant lengths, although the texture of my hair is so light that I used to joke that other people grew their hair long and I grew my hair ‘tall’. Indeed, my wild hair was virtually a trademark, though few knew how much care and effort it took to keep it looking so fine. Phillip was an expert at cutting ‘Black hair’, and I later discovered that my friend, Faith Bandier, was one of his regular customers, too. Phillip also began to help me in my work.

  I took many poor people to him for discount, sometimes free, haircuts, but one client stands out particularly in my mind. She had been in an abusive relationship in a small country town. Aware of her circumstances, I had urged her to make the break and get away, an extremely difficult thing to do with many of her husband’s relatives living in the same town.

  Once, after receiving a beating by her husband that left her hospitalised with her injuries, a local doctor and some nurses conspired to help her leave. She had small children with her when she arrived in Sydney, and I found her a safe house out on the northern beaches.

  My other commitments meant that I could not spend any great length of time with her, and she soon grew lonely and nostalgic for the friends and relatives she had also had to abandon. When she learned that an uncle had died in a town near her home, she felt obliged to attend his funeral. She was determined just to slip in and out for the service, and planned to leave the children with people she knew in Sydney.

  A few days later I received a hysterical phone call asking me to pick her up in Redfern. While waiting for her train at Central Station to carry her to the funeral, she had been abducted, taken to an unknown destination and kept in an underground cellar. There she had been repeatedly raped and beaten before making an escape. A stranger to Sydney, she had found a railway station and noted its name. Although she had no money, she was desperate to keep moving because she thought the man who had grabbed her once would try to grab her again when he discovered she had gone. She boarded the first train and alighted at Redfern, where she had previously been with me. She made her way to Redfern Police Station where she tried to report what had occurred.

  The police, however, were disbelieving and rude. An Aboriginal woman, she was somewhat overweight; perhaps they thought she did not look sufficiently attractive to be a rape victim. They suggested to her that she had just dumped her kids and gone away for a few days with a bloke who took her fancy, and, fearing she might be found out, she had made up a story to cover her tracks. They refused to take her account seriously or write a report, and sent her away.

  She went next door to the Aboriginal Medical Service. Staff there gave her a more polite reception, but again she was met with disbelief, which I found really disappointing.

  I picked her up and took her home to my place. She was in shock, traumatised with grief and as nervous as a skittish kitten. She told me brief details of her abduction, but by this time she had become even more disturbed by the fact that she had not been believed. She spoke disparagingly of herself and her worth, as a person and as a mother, I didn’t push her for conversation, but sat with her in case she wanted to say something, just let her know I was there to listen. I realised I had a threatening suicide situation on my hands.

  She kept lapsing into a silent wide-eyed state, a condition I diagnosed as sleep-deprivation. When I asked her if she wanted to lie down and rest, though, she was unable to do so. That afternoon, when my children came home from school, I left her with Naomi, who was only about eight years old, and went out to buy food for our evening meal. I felt she’d be safe with Naomi for a few minutes because Naomi was such a gasbag. I knew she wouldn’t stop talking until I returned, and her remarks were always very positive. Even as I was preparing to leave, I could hear Naomi talking: ‘Can I have a look at your earrings? Oh, aren’t they beautiful! And your hair is so shiny. And, oh look, your skin is so smooth and soft.’ That’s just the sort of child Naomi was—when she wanted to be.

  My guest’s inability to settle down became a serious problem, and I knew sleeplessness would heighten her suicidal thoughts. I, myself, was exhausted, but couldn’t go to bed and leave her alone. As well as my genuine and deep concern for h
er, I also had to consider the welfare of my own two youngsters. I had to think about the impact it would have had on them if they went into the bathroom and found her with her wrists cut. On the other hand, it would be of no benefit to anyone if I stayed awake all night to keep her company and was unable to function the next day. So I persuaded her to take a sleeping tablet, which I kept on hand for such occasions. Then I put her to sleep beside me in my double bed so that if she stirred in the night, I, being a light sleeper, would know.

  Next morning I had a plan of action, with the welfare of my client foremost in my mind. The woman was adamant that she would not subject herself to further hostility from the police or any other agency. The Aboriginal Medical Service had said they were unable to find any bruising on her body, which might have confirmed for them her version of events. By the next morning, however, they had surfaced. She had obviously suffered very deep bruising and, being overweight, these had taken time to rise to the skin. She looked like she’d been used as a punching bag. Seeing the marks set her off on a crying spell, which I regarded as healthy. Tears can sometimes heal.

  What she had told me of her abduction was fresh in my mind. She had arrived early at Central Station and, while waiting for her train, had walked out to the concourse in front of the station. A man in a car parked near the kerb had slid across the seat and called out to ask her the time. As she approached the car, looking down at her watch, she found herself being forced into the passenger seat, head first, and pushed under the dashboard. The man then put his foot on her head and drove away.

  She had freed herself from under his foot for just a few moments before he secured her again, and she had described for me a sign she had seen in that brief glimpse. It consisted of just three letters and they appeared to be on the top of a tall building. The woman didn’t know Sydney, but I did, and I had a good idea which building and sign she had seen.

  After getting the children off to school that morning we got into the car, and I told her that I had a call to make. I approached the building from the direction I felt her abductor was likely to have taken, and although she had been sitting quietly beside me during the ride, when it came into view and she spotted the sign on top, she held her hands to her breast and started to scream. I pulled over and we talked.

  I thought back to my own experience when I had wandered around in a bizarre dream world, doubting my own sanity, until I was eventually believed and later confronted with tangible evidence. I wanted her to be able to confirm for herself the reality of the abduction and attack. Seeing the building and the sign enabled her to do so. She kept repeating between her sobs, ‘I knew I wasn’t making it up, I knew I wasn’t mad.’

  Her relief at seeing the evidence and realising that I believed her story was enormous, and she clung to me as though I was her only friend. While she talked, my mind raced ahead to the rest of my plan, which was to try to help her restore some sense of self-esteem. I knew this would be a long task, eventually completed alone, but there were steps I could take to help her.

  First I brought her to Phillip Pearce’s hair-dressing salon. Phillip could always sense when I had something critical going down, and needed no brief. While I flicked through magazines and rang the office on his phone, Phillip transformed her. He gently shampooed and massaged her head then cut off her long and badly neglected hair and created for her a style which curled cheekily around her face, flattering her features. When she caught a glance of herself in the mirror, the first flicker of a smile appeared. ‘I didn’t recognise myself,’ she told me softly—which had been my intention. Phillip waved us goodbye without charge. On the way to the car, the woman asked, ‘Who’s going to pay for that?’ She’d noticed the schedule of fees on the wall, she told me, and had been worried about it the entire time. She had no money and she knew from the state of my house that I had very little.

  ‘Phillip’s a friend. You’ll have to consider your new looks a gift from the gods,’ I told her. ‘You deserve it.’ She was really pleased with her new image and kept patting her hair, smiling.

  From there we went to North Sydney to the business of another friend, Maureen Pettit. I had met Maureen and her outrageously extroverted husband, Arthur, when they ran a hifi and record shop in Crow’s Nest. Len Wallis, who went on to own a hi-fidelity audio company, worked with them. They had become committed to the cause of assisting me in whatever way they were able, on the strength of the few bits and pieces I had shared with them about my life and work. Maureen ran a clothing store, Blush, and a nod was all that was required for her to slide my client into a dressing room and hand in a wonderful assortment of clothes to try on. ‘Just pick out a couple of pieces you really like,’ she told her, ‘and we’ll worry about the bill later.’ Of course there was no bill, and Maureen even treated us to lunch at a nearby coffee lounge.

  By now my client was beginning to feel quite special. When we returned to the house, with just a little urging, she modelled her elegant new clothes. I was pleased with the enormous improvement—from the desperate soul of yesterday who had been racked with self-hatred and worry, to the woman who now stood before me, looking at herself in the mirror in wonderment.

  I made arrangements for her and her children to be re-united at the safe house the next day. Then I took her out with me to a discotheque in the hope that she would find music and dancing as relaxing as I did. Being mid-week, there were not a lot of people there, but enough for her to draw a few admiring glances and to be asked up to dance. I really wanted her to feel that she was still attractive, that the horrendous events she had been subjected to had not marked her permanently on the outside, and that, with fortitude, she could carry on with her life much as before, even as she hid her pain behind a facade of cheeriness.

  Within a few days, however, I received a call from someone at the safe house—a man had come to the door asking for her, and she had gone out with him for a few hours. Later the person phoned me again to say the woman was now packing to leave.

  I spoke with her on the phone. She had, she said, had time to think about everything that had happened. She was thankful that she had had a friend like me to turn to, but she had to think about her whole life. She’d phoned a relative of her husband’s and asked her to tell him where she was. He had come straight down to Sydney on the train, and was taking her home that very night.

  ‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’ I asked, and her answer chilled me to the bone.

  ‘No woman’s safe. I’m not safe in Sydney and I’m not safe at home. I know that now. So if someone’s going to kill me, I’d rather it be someone that I know.’

  4

  My work brought me into contact with people who had flamboyant and unconventional lifestyles. John Newfong, whom I had met at a One People of Australia League (OPAL) conference in Brisbane in the 1960s, was one such person.

  While always effusive and jovial to my face, during the 1970s John wrote a hostile article about me in the government-subsidised Black community magazine, Identity, when he was editor. Amongst other things, he wrote that I was a ‘Johnny-come-lately’, and implied a sexual relationship between Germaine Greer and myself when we travelled to Alice Springs in 1972. Not a word of this was true.

  The more I learned about John, the more obvious it became that he often projected his own shortcomings onto other people, myself included. After taking legal advice about the article, I contacted him. ‘I would suggest that your best line of defence would be to write an article for my magazine . . .’, he replied from his Canberra base. There were few writers in the Black community and Identity was always soliciting people to contribute material. However, the idea that I would submit an article to his editorial pen—instead of suing him—was ludicrous.

  Brian Syron, Aboriginal Theatre director, who had recently returned from studying acting and directing overseas, was a close friend of mine. Jailed in his youth, Brian then left Australia and had, he said, been able to prosper abroad because he was fair-skinned and didn’t
identify himself as Aboriginal, a situation he makes quite clear in his autobiography, Kicking Down The Doors.

  Both MumShirl and Brian regaled me with tales of the escapades of John Newfong, who, since our initial meeting, had ‘come out of the closet’, identifying himself publicly as homosexual. They were both people to whom John turned when he had ‘problems’.

  MumShirl’s favourite anecdote, which always set her laughing until tears ran down her face, was about a time when love-lorn John had approached her to help him ‘rescue’ his love object, a slim, fair, long-haired white lad, from the clutches of a sect to which he had apparently fallen victim. John was a bear of a man, dark, tall, rotund, and gregarious, and he often seemed to attract his exact opposites.

  John had learned the daily schedule of the recent recruits to this sect. So, with MumShirl and at least one other, a driver no doubt, to assist, he waited in a car in a street outside the sect’s headquarters at night for the youth to have a break and emerge briefly for fresh air in the garden. After waiting unsuccessfully the first night, they returned 24 hours later to make a second attempt. On this occasion, they pounced on a long-haired blond lad and bundled him headfirst into the back seat, and John squeezed himself in too.

  They had gone some distance in silence, Mum said, before John’s voice broke the dramatic mood. ‘God, I hope we’ve got the right one!’ It was this comment that always cracked MumShirl right up.

  A politically savvy conversationalist, through his work as a journalist, lohn had made contacts all over the world. But he was enormously self-indulgent and lost jobs because he thought nine in the morning was an entirely unreasonable hour of the day to be expected to arrive at work.