I Came to Say Goodbye

by Caroline Overington

  The prosecution has directed my attention to Mr McCain’s victim impact statement. Mr McCain has taken pain-relief medication on a daily basis since the assault. Mr McCain still requires medication to sleep.

  Mr McCain has said in his statement that he fears going out at night. He no longer parks his car in car parks that are not well-lit.

  In the normal circumstance, this court would order you downstairs, Mr Haines, to serve the three year prison sentence for this second set of offences, committed when you were on a good behaviour bond for the first set of offences.

  This court has, however, provided you with a Legal Aid lawyer. That lawyer is your counsel. Your counsel has asked this court to consider suspension of your sentence.

  Your counsel notes that you have pleaded guilty, in the process saving this court time and money.

  Your counsel points to your co-operation, and your remorse.

  I turn now to your personal circumstances.

  At the time of this offending, you were addicted to alcohol, cannabis and prescription drugs. You had taken Valium, used cannabis, and consumed a substantial quantity of port wine.

  Your counsel has submitted that your use of alcohol and drugs stems from the events of your childhood. Your parents died when you were young, and you were subsequently accused of the near-drowning of a young boy. You were cleared of blame but your counsel has submitted that rumours about your involvement have dogged you throughout your life.

  You first began using cannabis at age 12, and were using it daily at the time of your most recent offending. You have taken prescription medication since the age of 18 and your doctor-shopping, to which you admit, suggests to me that you are also addicted to Valium.

  Following your arrest for your most recent offending, you were in custody for seven days.

  The experience of being incarcerated came as a shock to you. You have described that experience to me as being ‘like a wake-up call.’

  Your counsel asks this court to consider a non-custodial sentence. The prosecution opposes that course. The prosecution argues for a custodial sentence. The prosecution points to the seriousness of your offending, and to the repetitive nature of your offending.

  The prosecution notes that the maximum sentence for aggravated assault is 20 years in prison.

  The prosecution directs my attention to the injuries sustained by your victim.

  The prosecution submits that your lack of compliance with previous good behaviour bonds does not augur well for your future compliance.

  I say to you now, Mr Haines, the prosecution is determined to have you incarcerated. I myself am of that mind.

  Three times, you have appeared before this court. On two occasions, you have been given the benefit of a good behaviour bond. Twice, you squandered those opportunities to change your ways.

  Your counsel submits compelling reasons to suspend the jail sentence that I intend to impose upon you.

  Those reasons are this: your guilty plea; your show of remorse; your new insight into the impact of your offending; your willingness to abide by a drug testing regime; your stable employment; your stable relationship; the ‘wake-up call’ you received, upon being imprisoned for seven days.

  Then, too, there is the matter of your impending fatherhood. Your long-time partner, Donna-Faye Atley, is expecting a child, Mr Haines. Without your support, your business, and her business conducting pony rides at local fetes is likely to close. Beyond that, there is the possibility that the responsibilities of parenthood will help mature you, Mr Haines.

  It is with these reasons in mind that I intend, Mr Haines, to sentence you to three years imprisonment, for those offences to which you have pleaded guilty.

  I intend also to suspend your sentence, and to order you to enter into a bond in the sum of $1500.

  It occurs to me, Mr Haines, that in suspending your sentence, I risk making a fool of myself. This court has been lenient to you in the past. You have made a mockery of its leniency. But this court is giving you another chance, a final chance, to rehabilitate yourself, and the reason I’m doing that, Mr Haines, is that you are soon to become a father. That will be a transformative experience. There will soon be a young person – a tiny baby – entirely dependent upon you, Mr Haines.

  At the risk of your continued mockery of this court, and its processes, I will suspend your sentence, but I say to you now, Mr Haines, if you do not take the chance, the final chance, that I am now giving you, you will be imprisoned. Come before this court again, Mr Haines, there will be no leniency.

  Mr Haines, you may sit down.

  Chapter 5

  SO, THERE YOU HAVE IT, YOUR Honour. That’s how I found out that I was going to be a grandpa. Sitting in court, listening to the father of my daughter’s child getting sentenced for assault.

  How did I react? First up, I felt rage. I thought, how could I be so thick as to not know that Haines was up to his old ways, thieving and thumping people? I thought of myself going around there, trying to make nice, saying, ‘Hey, Paul, how about those Roosters?’ I felt – excuse my French – like a prize dickhead.

  On the other hand … Fat was pregnant! That was what the magistrate had said. There was going to be a baby. I’d been sitting next to Fat on one of the benches at the back of the courtroom and when he’d said it, I’d looked down at her belly and I’m buggered if she looked pregnant – she didn’t – but then Fat had always been a bit on the heavy side, or else maybe she wasn’t yet far enough along, so you couldn’t tell. But that’s definitely what the magistrate had said, Fat was having a baby.

  Now, I don’t know if you have grandkids, Your Honour, and if you don’t, it’s going to be hard for me to explain how a man feels when one of his kids – his daughters, especially – announces that she’s got one in the oven. First up, you think, hang on, I’m old enough to be a grandpa? I don’t feel old enough to be a grandpa! Then you start puffing up, like a big old balloon. I mean, I was obviously rapt about it, and maybe it felt especially good because there had been times, up until then, that I’d wondered whether any of my kids would ever get around to giving me a grandchild. I mean, this was 2003. Blue was 30, and Kat, she was 31, and neither of them looked even close to having kids. Kat had gone from her boarding school to university and from there she’d got a place at a law firm in the city, and they’d been so impressed with her, they’d offered to send her to London, to work in their London office, and she’d jumped at that opportunity, like she jumped at every opportunity. She’d met a fellow there, David, and before I knew what was happening, he’d slipped a rock on her finger that was the size of an iceblock and they were engaged. Early in 2001 they’d moved to New York and they’d planned to get married there and Kat had told us that she’d fly all of us – Blue and Fat and me – to New York for this big wedding they were going to have, at Windows on the World, on top of the World Trade Center, and at first, I’d said, no, no, because it was David’s money, wasn’t it, and I wasn’t sure I could accept so much, not to cover me and my adult kids, and then, too, you’ve probably guessed, I’m not the travelling overseas type. I’m more the type that thinks this is the best country in the world and nothing I’ve seen on TV has convinced me otherwise. Then again, how many times would Kat get married? Maybe only once, and so I’d just about made up my mind to go when those attacks happened at the World Trade Center and it seemed for a while like the world had changed. Kat said David’s parents, who had been real jetsetters, suddenly didn’t want to fly, not from London to New York, and besides that, Kat didn’t feel like a big party, not when the Windows on the World had been blown to pieces. So they ended up having the wedding in the registry office, and sending pictures back to us. I did try to get Kat to come home for a while. I said, ‘Kat, why not raise any kids you’ll have somewhere safe?’ I mean, who wants to live in a place where somebody’s trying to kill everybody? But Kat said, no, no, she was more determined than ever to stay, and David said, ‘We can’t let the terrorists win, Med’ and so t
hey stayed on, and I thought, well, that might mean that they’re not having kids, because who would raise kids in New York, with all the crime and so on? And when I talked to Kat, I did get the feeling that she wasn’t inclined that way because it was always how she wanted to achieve this and she wanted to achieve that, and nothing at all about wanting to settle down and raise a family.

  As for Blue, well, I’d encouraged him to think pretty hard before settling on a girl to marry, reminding him that his mother and me, we’d tied the knot too young and look how that had worked out, and he seemed pretty happy with that advice and as far as I knew, there was nobody serious on the scene and how could there be? Out there on the Ridge, where he was living, blokes outnumbered women something like eight to one. Plus, you have to take into account how Blue was living. He’d staked his claim and tunnelled down and from time to time, a black opal would come to the surface, but for the most part, he had a tarp, and a drop toilet and no plumbing, so when it was time to have a shower – and believe me, that time didn’t seem to come around all that often for folk on the Ridge – he’d rig a bucket up on a rope and let water come down over him, and while the simplicity of it had its charm for a bloke like Blue, I couldn’t see a woman enjoying herself out on that drafty loo.

  As for Fat, well, as I say, this was 2003 so Fat was coming up to 21, which was older than Pat and me had been when we’d had Kat, but still, who would have thought, of the three kids, Fat would be the first to fall in? But that is what seemed to be happening. I mean, I’d sat in the Forster Local Court and heard it from the Magistrate. Med Atley, ready or not, you are going to be a grandpa, and so I walked out of court that day on that cloud that people talk about, just light with a kind of disbelief, and Fat was beside me, and we pushed through the heavy doors and went out onto the footpath, and I was about to say, ‘Well, you’ve put the wind in my sails’ when Fat said, ‘Have you got your chequebook, Dad?’

  I said, ‘Chequebook?’ and Fat said, ‘For the bond. We need you to put up the bond, or else they won’t let Paul come out.’ I thought, ‘So that’s why it was so urgent for me to be here’ and, had I not heard the news about the baby, I might have thought, ‘I’m buggered if I’m going to pay money to keep this bloke out of prison’ but Fat took me by the arm and led me back through the heavy doors to the counter where there was a lady sitting behind glass, and Fat said, ‘We’re here for Paul Haines. The sentence was suspended. We’ve got to pay a bond’ and she pushed me forward. I found myself going through my pockets. I had no chequebook on me. Fat went pale. She said, ‘Dad, you’ve got to get it or they’ll take him down.’

  I said, ‘Let me go get it.’ The lady said, ‘We close at four.’ I said, ‘I’ll be back by three-thirty.’ I drove back up to my place, all the while thinking, Grandpa, Grandpa, Grandpa, and imagining myself at the local club, showing a picture of my grandkid around. I took the chequebook from the drawer in the sideboard and drove back to the courthouse. Fat was still waiting by the counter. I made out the cheque. I signed it. Fat passed it under the glass. The lady stamped it, and stapled it to some paperwork. She said, ‘Mr Haines should be out shortly’ and she wandered off, to do whatever filing she had to do, and while she was gone, Fat hugged me and I hugged her gently, so as not to squash the baby, and then I held her at arm’s length. I looked down at her belly. I said, ‘Fat, why didn’t you tell me?’

  She said, ‘Tell you what?’ and I said, ‘That you’ve got one in the oven!’ and her face, it just fell. You know how a person’s face just falls, like they’ve just realised that what they’ve been thinking about, and what’s been making them feel happy, isn’t the same thing you’ve been thinking about and isn’t the same thing that’s making you feel happy?

  Fat said, ‘Come on, Dad, look, here’s Paul’ and Haines came towards us, rubbing his wrist where the cuffs had been. He said, ‘Hey, Pop’ and grinned at me, with that one tooth of his and Fat said, ‘Paul!’ like that, sharp and short, and she marched off down the street, away from the courthouse, towards where we’d parked. I followed, with Haines, after stopping to light himself a smoke, coming up behind me. And it was only when we got near the car that Fat turned and said, ‘There is no baby, Dad.’

  I said, ‘What?’

  She said, ‘There’s no baby. We just made that up because Paul can’t go to jail.’

  Well, it was like a punch in the gut. No baby? The judge had said there was a baby. The very reason that Haines was walking out of this court, right now, it was because there was going to be a baby. I said, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  Fat, she said, ‘There’s no baby!’ and she got in the passenger seat, and Haines, he was grinning, and grinding his cigarette, and making like he was going to get in the car, too.

  I said, ‘You hang on a minute, Haines. You got off prison with that baby story. You come right back into that courthouse with me, and you tell the judge that was a load of bullshit, and you take what punishment is coming to you’ but it wasn’t like either of them was listening. Fat was already in the car and she wouldn’t look at me, she just kept staring out the windscreen, and Haines was blowing the last of the smoke out of his toothless gob and getting in the driver’s seat and pulling the seatbelt around him and starting up the motor. I knocked on Fat’s window. I said, ‘Fat, what you’ve done, that is a crime. It’s perjury’ but what would Haines have cared about that? He just pulled out of the car park, and left me standing there, outside the courthouse, like a bloody fool.

  It was a month before I heard from Fat again. She phoned me up. The conversation we had, it was the grunting kind, with Fat saying, ‘How’s the Shire? How’s the dog?’ – and me saying as little as possible, until it became too excruciating for her to go on, but the next week, she called again, and look, the truth is, when it comes to that girl, I’m just a softie. I was then, I am now, even with all that’s happened. I let her win me over. She said, ‘Come on, Dad, we had to do it’ and, ‘I couldn’t have Paul in jail’ until I finally said, ‘Fat, you doublecrossed me. You lied in a court of law. That’s not the way you were raised. You need to have a good look at what that bloke has done to you.’

  She wouldn’t have that, of course. I mean, she was blind to his malice. It was all, ‘Oh, you don’t understand him, Dad’ and, ‘People have always picked on him’ and, ‘He’s not like you think’ and in the end, I just said, ‘Fat, you pull a stunt like that again, it will be you they put in prison, you know that, don’t you?’ but she didn’t seem to get that, either, she just said, ‘Come on, Dad. Paul’s good. Just forget about it and come over to the house.’

  I said, ‘I’ve got no desire to see that man. You want to say hi, you come here, and you don’t bring him, because I won’t be held responsible for what I’d do to him if he dared to show his face around here’ and Fat said, ‘Well, have it your way’ and hung up on me again but then my birthday came around, and she brought over a gift – socks, I think, it was always socks – and although I wasn’t home when she came by, I did go around to her place, the day after my birthday I believe it was, and I thought Haines must know he’s on his last chance with me, because he tried to engage me in a conversation. He said, ‘I put up a new shed’ and I’d seen that on the way up the drive. He said, ‘I’ll show you round.’ We actually walked out of his house together, and through a back paddock to where he’d put this new shed up. I said, ‘Pretty impressive’ and it actually was and it was cleaner than the building they were living in, which was always a bit smoke-filled and slumping, whereas this place had guttering and downpipes and electricity, and it was bloody enormous, too, and like a fool, I said to Haines, ‘And what are you going to do with it?’ because to me, it didn’t look like the right kind of thing for ponies, and Haines, he said, ‘Oh, I’ll figure something out’ and we walked back to the house again, and Fat passed both of us a beer and that actually wasn’t such a bad afternoon. Only later, when I mentioned the shed to one of their neighbours, a bloke I knew from the Shire, he
said, ‘You’re not serious, Med? Mate, that shed he’s built, it glows all night. He’s growing dope.’

  I was astounded. I thought, Do not tell me that Haines has walked me around his dope growing enterprise, and done so with pride and made a complete goose of me in the process? But that was the kind of bloke he was, just brazen. Like with the new car. Not too long after the shed went up, out of nowhere, Haines started driving a new Holden ute, a special vehicle, tricked up to the nines, in a lairy purple with a Bundy bear on the rear window, expensive as anything and, as far as anybody knew, he didn’t have a job.

  I said, ‘Fat, is Haines dealing?’

  She said, ‘Dealing what?’

  I said, ‘Well, at five bucks a ride I find it hard to believe he can afford an HSV from the pony shows? Do you take me for an idiot, Fat? What’s going on in that back shed?’

  Fat said, ‘You always think the worst’ and that was fair enough. When it came to Haines, I always did think the worst and so far, I have not been wrong, and it was for that reason that I kept trying, at least in those days, to get my girl to see sense, that she had hooked up with a loser but there was still time to get out, and she could come home and go back to school and start fresh but who was I kidding? Fat had been out on Haines Road since she was 16 years old. Her world revolved around that bastard. She was completely isolated from her cousins, and even from Auntie Edna, who wouldn’t go out to the Haines property, not after the first time she’d gone there and found Haines with footy socks on, his knees wrapped around a milk crate, using brass scales to weigh the dope.

  She said, ‘I’m sorry, Med. He gives me the heebie-jeebies.’

  I said, ‘You didn’t say that when I first mentioned to you that she was going around with him.’

  She said, ‘I thought it was just a passing thing’ and it was good to hear that she was on my side, but still, a little too late. Anyway, Edna said, ‘Well, things could be worse. She might actually have been pregnant’ and I said, ‘Touch wood’ and I tapped the table, but that obviously doesn’t bloody work, because the minute those words were out of Edna’s mouth, the minute we’d discussed the possibility that Haines might actually father a grandchild of mine, rather than just pretend to do it as a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card, Fat turned up with news. I’d just made a cuppa and I made another for her and we were sitting at the kitchen table and she said, ‘So, you’re going to be a grandfather’ and at first I thought, don’t tell me she’s trying to make a joke of what happened because I wasn’t ready to see the funny side. But then I saw she wasn’t joking and I said, ‘Says who?’