by Rod Jones
When it had first happened, being late, she had been so afraid of telling him. And then Neil had sent that stupid note. Still, he’d said, they would continue to love each other in that other world that was forever Cockatoo. Now, after seeing the engagement notice, she knew she shouldn’t have believed a word of it.
Sometimes the sound of a girl’s screams carried from the hospital wing at the back of the Haven. If that was childbirth, the pain of squeezing forth life from life, Anna dreaded what lay ahead of her.
She heard all kinds of rumours. She heard that girls were made to sign papers and then their baby was taken away. The girl left quickly, it was all arranged, sometimes without even saying goodbye. The birth certificate was changed so that you could no longer have any contact with your baby, or any way of finding him. There were rumours about the drugs they used on you. Sedatives to knock you out, so you wouldn’t be aware of what they were doing. Barbiturates. Anti-psychotics. And after the birth? She heard the stories about stilboestrol to dry up your milk, the binding of the breasts with a calico cloth secured with a safety pin. When a girl was uncooperative, she was shackled to the bed in the labour ward. Anna also heard that sometimes, when you were giving birth, they put a pillow over your face, or put up a sheet, so that you couldn’t see your baby. The unmarried mothers were not supposed to see or touch their babies. A married woman whose own child had been stillborn might be offered a child for adoption in its place. Where had that baby come from? There were rumours that some single mothers were told their baby had died, when in fact the child had been taken for a ‘rapid adoption’.
Anna did not yet know what really happened; in a way it was worse to imagine it.
She would take her baby home to Mum and Dad’s, and somehow they would survive. They had said they were going to stick by her. Through thick and thin. The thing Anna was most afraid of wasn’t the Welfare, or the Salvos, or even that Mum and Dad might change their minds, but a part of her own mind that she did not trust. It was a black despair that sometimes bloomed and spread through her thoughts: the part of her that wanted to be defeated, that just wanted to give up. Even when she steeled her mind against the Salvos, Anna was not always able to block out the poisonous phrases they repeated to shame her, make her passive, steal her personality. Her old life wasn’t hers any more. She was living someone else’s life here.
There were moments at the Haven, with the eleven o’clock sunshine coming through the laundry windows, when her thoughts floated free for a while, and she forgot to feel afraid. But then the thought always came back, about what might have been if Neil had stuck by her, and she always ended up feeling frightened and alone again.
‘Christ, you’re a mess,’ Leanne said. ‘Just take a look at yourself in the mirror.’
Anna stared: red eyes, red face, hair everywhere. She had been crying, long sobs ending in a shudder. ‘I like crying,’ Anna said. And they both burst out laughing because it was a funny thing to say.
‘Don’t be a sook,’ Leanne said. ‘Come out to the lane with me while I have a fag.’
They crossed the courtyard and went through the gate behind the laundry, making sure there was no face at the flap in the door of Matron’s office. Leanne sucked on a Turf cork-tipped. ‘You know the house next door? That one there—on the other side of the wall? Well, sometimes I see a man standing at the upstairs window, looking down, watching me.’
Anna took in a sudden sharp breath of air. ‘Is he watching us now?’
‘No. But I often see him watching. He must be a millionaire to live in a big house like that. He’s always wearing a red waistcoat and standing at that window, smoking a cigarette. He has this funny little smile on his face. I can’t make up my mind if he’s laughing at me or if he feels sorry for me.’
‘You’d do well to ignore him.’
The sky was heavy and grey; it was going to rain. Leanne said, ‘I tell myself he has fallen in love with me and one day he’ll come and take me away.’
‘That’s a pretty fairy tale!’ Anna laughed.
‘Pathetic, aren’t I?’ Leanne screwed up her freckled face and took another drag on her cigarette. ‘Still, I will be going away from here one day, me and the baby. After the deed is done.’
‘So you’re going to keep your baby, too?’
‘My mum and dad wouldn’t let me back with the baby. They’d be too worried about what people would think.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
At the sound of the bell for the evening meal, Leanne stepped on her cigarette butt and they moved towards the gate.
Leanne said, ‘Well, I’m going to keep my baby. That’s what I’m going to do.’
They had reached the steps up to the familiar back door, and from there they made their way to the dining room. Most of the girls were already seated at the scrubbed tables. The two latecomers found their places.
‘I want to ask you something,’ Leanne said.
‘I’m listening.’
That night they were having cutlets, a better meal than those Margaret usually served up. She must have been on good terms with the butcher, or perhaps he was sweet on her at the moment.
Eating her meat and drinking her tea, Leanne smiled a crafty smile. ‘You know the Women’s Hospital in Carlton? Well, I’ve heard they take unmarried girls for their lying-in. Come closer. I don’t want anyone else to hear. So I reckon if I pretend I’m going to the shops with you one Saturday, I just might not come back. If that happens, and they ask what happened to me, tell them you don’t know. Just say I must have got lost in Myer’s.’
‘I have an idea,’ Anna said. ‘What if we both got lost in Myer’s?’
‘Would you really?’
‘You don’t think I have the guts to do it?’
Leanne seemed to consider the idea for a moment. Then she said, ‘Sure you do.’
‘Hang on, what would we do for money?’
‘I’m pretty sure they take in charity cases.’
‘Well, we have to give it a try.’
Anna held out her hand under the edge of the table. ‘We have to stick together,’ she added, and they shook on it.
The two girls continued to talk about how they would keep their babies. One of the Crows must have overheard them, because later she sought Anna out. ‘You foolish girl! You think you’re going to keep your baby. But let me tell you something—in the end, girls like you always have to give them up.’
Anna felt the rising urge to slap the woman’s face. She struggled to control herself. Since she had come to the Haven, Anna had tried to hide behind a docile manner. If I don’t make trouble, she had thought, perhaps they will go easy on me. But belonging to this company of girls was more complicated than that. You couldn’t hide by being docile. The Salvos had a way of finding you out, even if you never answered them back, and didn’t dare to look them in the eye, and even if you joined in singing their Glory Bloody Hallelujah.
Stupid girl, foolish girl, wicked girl, sinful girl. Anna heard herself called these names so many times she came to believe them.
At prayers in the chapel, the girls were harangued. ‘Get on your knees, girls! God knows what you did! Do you really think you can keep secrets from His all-seeing eye? He will take pity on a poor sinner if only she will repent.’
Well, I ain’t sorry for you no more, you crazy, psalm-singing, skinny old maid!
Bogey appeared in the chapel and gave Anna that shamefaced, apologetic smile of his. Charlie Allnut was his name in the film. Katharine Hepburn was the missionary, Rose Sayer.
Bogey appeared to Anna more and more at the Haven—in the chapel, and when she was in bed at night unable to sleep.
Things are never so bad that they can’t be made worse, he told her.
When she was working in the laundry, she heard the sound of an engine. It was a mechanical sound—a steam engine. A boiler? The sound was meant for her and for no one else. It was as though the engine wanted her to do something. Then she remembered Bogey’s dirty little steamboat in The African Queen.
The sound of the steamboat on the river was the beginning of the illness that saved her. Bogey looked at her. His grease-streaked face seemed to reassure her. He was going to rescue her. He was going to take her and her baby away from here.
It was the first week in December. Leanne must have been close because she had been taken off laundry duties that Friday. With her great belly, she had hardly been able to sit on the gutter in the bluestone lane. She was so far gone that they had not been able to pull off their shopping expedition on the Saturday.
‘So much for our grand plans,’ Leanne said at lunch on Sunday.
‘Don’t worry. Things will work out,’ Anna told her. ‘Just remember—whatever happens, don’t sign anything.’
Leanne nodded, but Anna could see that she was demoralised.
At midday on Monday, Anna came in to have dinner and Leanne wasn’t at the table. One of the girls said Leanne had gone into labour that morning and had been taken to the hospital wing.
There was no news of Leanne all week. On Saturday, Anna heard that Leanne was back. When she went up to Leanne’s dormitory, a shape in her bed was quietly weeping. ‘A little boy,’ Leanne said. ‘I called him Jesse. They wouldn’t even let me hold him.’ Matron had injected her with something, then showed her the typed paper with her name signed. ‘But it wasn’t my handwriting!’ she wailed to Anna.
Leanne was devastated. Anna tried to think of some way to comfort her friend, but how do you console someone when a thing as terrible as that has happened?
Leanne’s people hadn’t come to take her away yet. Maybe their car had broken down, or there was no train from Leongatha that day. But when Anna came back up after tea, Leanne was gone. She didn’t have a chance to say goodbye.
Anna felt her whole being change, as though a new voice spoke through her with calm authority, an intelligence born of pure hatred for the Salvos and what they had done to her friend. So, Anna would wait to take her revenge on these Salvos. She would defeat Matron by being resolute. When she finally did get out of this place, it would be with her baby.
And in the years ahead? If she ever saw the Salvos on Friday nights with their brass bands farting out hymns on street corners, just let one of them come up and try to sell her the bloody War Cry and see what she gets! Anna could imagine it all. She would rip off the first black bonnet she saw. A bread knife in the belly. Split her skull open with a hammer. These homicidal fantasies warmed her and gave her a secret smile.
Anna let the demon enter her, that night after Leanne was taken away, the demon the Salvos had spoken about in their threats and prayers. How could anything in their Hell frighten Anna now? They had stolen Leanne’s baby. They wanted to steal Anna’s baby, too. What could be worse than that?
She realised only now how hard she was going to have to fight to keep her baby. She was determined not to suffer Leanne’s fate.
That’s what life is about, in the end, she thought: women keeping babies.
ONE MORNING ANNA woke to find herself bleeding. The doctor ordered bed rest. She didn’t leave her bed for three days, except to go to the lavatory. One of the young Salvos brought her meals on a tray. Although Matron did not put in an appearance, she must have been aware of the situation.
Mostly, Anna slept. She would sleep all afternoon, wake for a few hours and lie there, then sleep all through the night. The other girls left her alone. She had begun to withdraw from the Haven into her own world.
Her illness was not feigned. Its symptoms were physical—her brain shut down and some power pulled her irresistibly towards sleep. Her mind had found a way to abolish the Haven and to silence the Salvos’ songs. Her journey along the dark river with Bogey was her way of denying their god. Not just denying his existence, which might have been a childish way of taking revenge on them, but hating the God that had put her in the Haven. For the rest of her life, Anna was sure, she would never pass a church of any denomination without feeling a shudder of revulsion.
She wasn’t always ill, unfortunately. There were days of relative normality, when she could speak to the other girls, when she could meet the curious eye of Matron and answer questions put to her, and do the bit of floor-scrubbing required of her in order for Matron to save face, or work for an hour in the laundry. There were always so many sheets to be washed, starched, dried and ironed, and Anna liked the warmth of the steamy laundry.
But then she felt the heaviness descend again. The baby inside her was the least of it. She sat down wherever she was, or lay on her side on the floor and went to sleep. Sometimes they had to carry her upstairs. Or she felt her feet moving towards the dormitory, towards her bed, without her having decided it: her feet knew better than she did.
Anna had discovered her weapon. But she would need further weapons to help her keep her baby. Sometimes she thought that on the river, behind that mechanical sound, Bogey was trying to whisper how she might go about it.
Doctors brought interns from the university to practise on the girls at the Haven. Anna felt herself being poked and prodded from every direction.
‘This one’s eight months gone, reported bleeding from the uterus, baby seems to be still kicking, though. Any ideas?’ the head doctor asked.
‘Could be a very late period,’ one student said, and the others sniggered.
‘Now, that’s enough, Mr Parsons, this is no place for your questionable humour. Any others?’
‘A lesion in the cervix?’ another student tried. The students talked about her as though she wasn’t in the room.
Some of the doctors told the girls to take off their clothes even if it was just to take their temperature or blood pressure, but Doctor Jericho was different from the others. He did not ask Anna to take off her clothes. He did not give her an internal examination. He was dressed differently from the other doctors, too. He wore a fine tweed suit, and he seemed compassionate. He was some kind of specialist, she thought.
‘What’s wrong with me, Doctor?’ Anna asked. She began to shake and she tried to hold back her sobs.
‘You’re so wound up in your worries that your body has gone on strike.’
‘Yes,’ she said. She knew he was right.
‘What do you think is going to happen?’ he asked.
‘I’ll have my baby and keep it and take it home with me. I’ve got my mum and dad on my side. They’ve promised to stick by me.’
The doctor watched her face closely. ‘You are exhausted. I’ll ask Matron that you be excused from all work. It’s essential for your own health and that of your baby.’
‘You don’t believe me, do you? You don’t think my mum and dad are going to stick by me?’
He was silent for a long time. Then he said, ‘I’m always very careful a
bout what—and who—I believe.’
In her new state of mind, it was finally clear to Anna that Neil had done the dirty on her. She had even thought he might have been paying the Salvation Army for her board. She asked her dad on one of his visits. ‘You don’t need to worry about that,’ he told her. ‘Forget about Neil. He didn’t have the moral fibre to do the right thing by you.’
Yet Anna could not give up her memories, even when sometimes they made her so miserable that she truly wanted to die. But at other times, when she thought about the man she had loved, the man who had betrayed her, the man she still loved, if truth be told, she felt she was back at Cockatoo again, it was all still happening, time did not exist.
Anna no longer listened to the Salvos. She was ill, but they had not broken her. In bed at night, she hugged her swollen belly and conducted silent conversations with her unborn child, telling him how much she loved him, vowing to protect him always. She could feel him moving inside her, kicking. She imagined holding him after he was born. With every last ounce of strength in her body she would stop them from taking him. Yes, she would have her victory over Matron. There would be nothing Matron could do, anyway, since Anna had Mum on her side.
The prospect that she might lose her baby, that she might have to go through the rest of her life searching for him, was unthinkable. She would keep her baby safe from these inhuman, baby-stealing fiends at the Haven.
Bogey would take her home and look after her. He would help her keep her child. In the chapel, with her eyes closed, she prayed not to Jesus Christ, but to Bogey. She called on Bogey to come and rescue her. But even as she was praying like this, she could still hear Matron’s cold voice in her head: ‘He won’t help you—this is what you deserve for getting pregnant.’
