I Came to Say Goodbye

by Caroline Overington

  Fat shook her head again, no.

  There was a bit more silence, and then the younger woman, the one who was apparently in charge of all the forms, she reached down and opened her briefcase, and she took out a sheet of paper, and I noticed her tone had completely changed, and she said, ‘Ms Atley, Mr Haines, I need to inform you that we will be heading to court this afternoon, and we’ll be applying for a care and protection order. Do you understand what that means?’

  And Fat, poor Fat, she just said, ‘What?’

  The young woman said, ‘Ms Atley, your son, Seth Atley-Haines, has suffered a serious injury, and we believe the injury was a non-accidental injury. You haven’t been able to provide us with an explanation for that injury. That being the case, we do not intend to return Seth to your care. I’m required to inform you that today we will be applying for an order to take your son into the State’s care, pending a full investigation.’

  Now, up until this point, I had managed to stay pretty calm, but now I moved away from the wall where I’d been leaning, and I said, ‘You what?’ and ‘This is ridiculous’ and Haines, too, he suddenly got mobile, getting out of his chair, saying, ‘You’re doing what?’

  The older woman, she said, ‘Please sit down, Mr Haines’ and Haines said, ‘I won’t bloody sit down’ and the older woman said, ‘Lower your voice’ and Haines said, ‘I’ll raise my voice. I’ll bring this roof down’ and for a moment there, I thought things might explode, except the younger woman, she pressed some kind of button, some button that must have been under the table, and the door opened, and a security guy came in – not a real bouncer, but dressed like a bouncer, with a torch in his belt and a walkie-talkie on his chest, to make him look menacing – and he ordered Haines out of there, and me, too, and Fat as well.

  Haines walked straight back through the rubber doors, through the waiting room, out into the car park, where he lit a smoke. I stood in the waiting room, waiting for Fat, but she didn’t come out, not straightaway. I strode around, head full of steam, marching up and down, with out-patients in their plastic chairs and their arms in their slings and their heads in bandages, no doubt thinking, What’s with this guy? and then the nurse on reception beckoned me over and said, ‘This is a hospital, sir. You’re going to have to calm down’ so I went outside and stood in the car park and lit my own smoke, and that’s where Fat found us – me and Haines – at opposite ends of the same forecourt at Forster General, our backs to each other, steam coming out of our ears.

  I was thinking, I’m gonna kill him, I’m gonna kill him, I’m gonna kill him if he’s touched that boy, because of course I knew, even on that first day, that if anything had happened to Seth, it wouldn’t have been Fat that had anything to do with it. I mean, no way, not even knowing what I now know, there was no way. It would have to have been that violent bastard she’d ended up living with, and so when Fat came out, we both moved towards her in an equal hurry, and she kind of stuck each hand out, as if to clear a path for herself, and said, ‘I want to go home’ and so of course that gave Haines permission to put his arm around her, and start guiding her towards their car. I said, ‘Wait, Fat, what’s going on?’ and she half-turned, and put a hand in her pocket, and a sheaf of papers came out – yellow, pink, green papers, like duplicates of something she’d signed – and she shoved them at me, and she got back under Haines’ arm and kept going towards their car, leaving me standing there like a stunned mullet, looking after them as their car went out through the exit barrier, and down the road, in the direction of the Haines property, and only when they were gone did I get a chance to look down at the papers Fat had shoved in my hand, and I pretty near vomited, right there in the hospital forecourt, because what they were, those papers, they were basically an application to take Seth into State care, and down the bottom was Fat’s signature, which could only mean she’d somehow been made to sign them.

  Well, I was that angry. I mean, Fat was no longer a child, but I had my doubts that she would have known what signing those papers meant. No way would she have understood the jargon, and she was in shock. She was a mother whose baby was on the way to John Hunter. I thought, this is an outrage. I went back into the hospital. I held up the papers. I said, ‘I want to see the social worker that gave this to my daughter.’ The girl on reception, she was trembling a bit, like I was making her feel anxious, or maybe she had seen this kind of thing before and knew it didn’t end well. That made me feel guilty. She had nothing to do with it. I hadn’t meant to frighten her. I’d just wanted to figure out what was going on, so I softened my tone and I asked her again, ‘Can I see the ladies who gave these forms to my daughter?’ but the girl on reception said, ‘I don’t think they’re here. I think they’ve left’ and I thought, ‘Is she bullshitting me?’ but then, no, I suppose it was possible that they were already on their way back to Newcastle, to get their child-abduction – really, that’s what I thought it was – underway, in the courts.

  I said, ‘Well, then, can I see my grandson?’

  The girl said, ‘Could you just wait here a minute please?’ and I waited and a bloke came out. I don’t know who he was, but he was a kind bloke. He was in some kind of scrubs. He said, ‘Mr Atley?’ and I said, ‘Yep’ and he said, ‘Your grandson is Seth Atley-Haines?’ and I said, ‘Yes’ and he said, ‘Seth has been stabilised. We’re about to get him on his way to John Hunter. It’s going to take an hour to get him there.’

  I said, ‘Well, let me see him before he goes’ and the bloke said, ‘I can’t do that, Mr Atley, and it’s not even really because of all that paperwork. Seth’s a very sick boy.’

  Well, that was the first time, Your Honour, that I’d heard that. Seth was sick. Really sick. I mean, I’d heard he’d had a temperature. I’d heard he’d been vomiting. I’d heard he wouldn’t take the bottle. He had to go to John Hunter but the women with the paperwork, they’d been all about, ‘What happened?’ and not how sick Seth was.

  As softly as I could manage it, I said, ‘Mate, I’m his grandfather. His mother, she’s my daughter. She wouldn’t have had anything to do with this. If I hang about, don’t make a nuisance of myself, sit quietly, why don’t you let me look in on him, just pop my head through the door before he goes?’

  As I say, the bloke was kind. He said, ‘Look, Mr Atley, let me make a deal with you. Why don’t you head home, and phone up later, and I’ll make sure I leave a note with the girl on reception, and she’ll be able to tell you what’s happened once he’s been transferred.’ Well, I didn’t want to accept that. I didn’t want to leave. I thought I’ll hang around the back and wait for the ambulance to come out and rush up and look in the window, but no matter how I looked, I couldn’t see where the ambulance would come out, so eventually, I did go home, and at six o’clock, I did call the hospital but it was a different nurse on the reception, and she didn’t know anything about this deal I’d made with the bloke in scrubs.

  I said, ‘Let me speak to the bloke I spoke to before, the one who said I should phone up’ and she said, ‘Do you know his name? I don’t really know who you mean’ and I said, ‘He didn’t give me his name’ and I tried to describe him, and she said, ‘We have 30 staff in the building’ and basically I got nowhere, so I put down the phone, and got out the Newcastle Yellow Pages, and looked up the John Hunter, and called them there, and basically got a brick wall. So I got in the car, with the aim of driving down the Pacific Highway, down to the John Hunter, if that’s what it took to see my grandson, who shouldn’t have been allowed to be on his own, not sick like he was, but on the way, of course, I had to pass the Haines place and the lights were on so I pulled up the gravel drive, and it had started to pour with rain, and there were puddles and patches all over the drive, and my car got splashed and I had to hopscotch through the puddles and I knocked on the door. When nobody answered, I thumped on it and said, ‘Open up, Haines’ and the door opened, and it was Haines.

  I said, ‘What have you heard?’

  He said, ‘We’ve hear
d nothing, except they’ve moved him down to John Hunter.’

  I said, ‘Where’s Fat?’

  He said, ‘She’s asleep.’

  I said, ‘Don’t give me, she’s asleep. How could she be asleep?’ and Haines said, ‘I gave her one of my Valium’ and I was appalled at that. I mean, drugs? That was Haines’ answer to everything. Drugs.

  I said, ‘What the hell went on here this morning?’ and Haines said, ‘Don’t you start on me’ and I said, ‘Start on you about what?’ and Haines said, ‘Well, what do you think went on, Med? What we said went on, went on. Seth got sick. We took him to hospital and now they’re blaming us.’

  I was still standing in the rain. There was none of this, ‘Come on in, don’t stand there in the rain.’ I had water pouring off me. Lightning cracked, and I had to shout. I said, ‘You think this is about you? This isn’t about you. Or is it about you?’

  Haines shouted back, into the wet, into the dark, ‘You listen to me, Med. That’s my son there in the hospital, not yours, and if all you’re going to offer is banging on my door and hanging it on me, you can piss off. I mean that, Med. Piss off, and don’t come back. I’ve put up with you because you’re a lonely bastard whose wife did a runner, but let me tell you, I’ve had it with you. You come here hanging Seth on me, you’re dead to us.’

  Well my head it felt like it might explode. My heart, it was coming up, out of my chest. I said, ‘You goddamn –’ and I made for him, and he put a hand up against my chest and said, ‘Alright, Med, you want to take this outside? Let’s take this outside’ and he stepped out from behind the security door, like to have a punch-up with me, right there in the rain on the gravel drive, but then through the screen door, I could see Fat – my Fat, now with milk down her shirt, in purple tracksuit bottoms and a pair of moccasins, red-eyed from crying – and she was coming towards us, saying, ‘Will you two just cut it out? Can’t you just stop’, and tears were pouring down her face, and she was saying, ‘Can’t you think of Seth for once’, and she reached out, grabbed for Haines, and he stepped back into the house. The door closed and I was left outside, standing in the dark and the rain.

  Chapter 7

  I DON’T LIKE TO CALL ON people for help. Men don’t, do they? From the youngest age, my old man told me, see if you can do it yourself. Only if you can’t, get someone to lend a hand. What he was talking about, though, was things like servicing the car or fixing a tap. With Seth, I didn’t even know what was going on, really. I was out of my depth, and I was buggered if I could think how to handle it, and so I called Kat. I called her in New York. It was something I hardly ever did, so I knew she’d know it was important.

  I reached her in her office. It was a weekend, but in those days, she was always in the office; Saturdays, Sundays, night-time, that’s where you’d find her. Her husband, David, was the same. When it came to working, they couldn’t get enough. They told me everyone was the same. The Americans were at war. They’d had a recession. Everybody was working hard just to hang on.

  I was confused by the way she answered the phone. She said, ‘Ka’aren Atley.’ Say what you like, but when your little girl has been known all her life as Kat Atley, she doesn’t just become Ka’aren Atley – ‘Ka’aren’ like Car-ren, Your Honour. The whole way that Kat spoke, it changed when she went to that school, and it changed again when she moved overseas. Australians are like that, aren’t they? Chameleons. They adapt.

  Anyway, I first thought, oh, I dialled the wrong number here, but when I said, ‘Is Kat there?’ she said, ‘Oh, Dad, it’s me!’ and then she said, ‘What’s wrong?’ because obviously, I didn’t call all that often, and it was mostly when I had news.

  I told her I phoned up to talk about Fat. I said I felt pretty confused. I didn’t know who else to try. I’d already tried Blue, but the only way to get him was to ring the local pub in Lightning Ridge, and that hadn’t worked out, not on a Saturday night. The barman couldn’t hear me or couldn’t work out what I wanted, and Blue never came on the line so I’d phoned Edna, and told her what had happened – Seth was in John Hunter, and they wouldn’t let me see him – and she couldn’t understand, either. She kept saying, ‘But that doesn’t make sense, Med. Why is he in the hospital? What happened to him?’ and I kept having to say, ‘That’s it, they won’t tell us’ and she’d say, ‘But that doesn’t make sense, Med’ and after a while it was clear that Edna wasn’t going to be of much help, although she did put the idea into my head to call Kat, when she said, ‘If they keep this up, Med, what you’re going to need is a lawyer’ because wasn’t Kat a lawyer? That’s what she’d done at university. Law. She’d know what to do.

  I explained the situation. I said, ‘You know, Kat, how Fat had the baby …’ and Kat did know that. She’d sent one of those ‘I heart NY’ baby suit things and she’d been on at Fat to send a picture on the email but we hadn’t managed to work out how to do it. I said, ‘Well, Fat came in from the night shift at Woolies and Seth was grizzling and the next day he was chucking up, and she took him into hospital, and now they’re saying it’s somehow Fat’s fault …’ and Kat, she was as stunned as me. She kept saying, ‘Fat? They think Fat hurt her own baby?’ and I had to explain how Fat hadn’t been home, that Haines had been home, and Kat said, ‘But that still makes no sense, Dad. If the police think Haines did something to the baby, what’s that got to do with Fat?’ and I had to say, ‘I don’t know, I don’t get it’ and Kat said, ‘It sounds like Fat needs a lawyer’ and I said, ‘Aren’t you a lawyer?’ and she said, ‘Oh, Dad, I’m not that kind of lawyer. I do patents. I do business agreements.’ She didn’t say the obvious, which was that she was in New York and even if she’d flown out that very afternoon, it would take her two days to get to Forster. She said, ‘Well, have they told you when Seth’s coming out?’ I mean, that’s where we were at, Your Honour. We were still saying things like, ‘Have they told you when he’s coming out?’ I mean, really, that shows how much we knew about how serious this thing was, which was sweet bugger all.

  Anyway, Kat, she said, ‘Look, Dad, I’ve got to get moving but give me an hour, and I’ll have a Google around, and I’ll see if I can find somebody to have a look at the paperwork for you’ and I could hear in her voice that she had to get off, and I said, ‘Well, okay’ and Kat, she said, ‘It’ll be fine, Dad. I have a good feeling about it’ and so I rang off and sat stewing, and not really knowing who else to call, or what else to do.

  Now, the following day, being Sunday, I couldn’t do much. I did one drive by John Hunter – hour there, hour back – but stopped myself from going in, in case I somehow made things worse, but my heart was just racing and pounding, thinking of Seth in there and not knowing what was wrong with him, and what they were doing to him, or anything, really. Then, on the Monday, I took the papers into my work, and showed them to the bloke who worked on legal matters for the Shire, a bloke called Barry. I said to him, ‘Barry, mate, I need a favour. Can you look these over for me?’ and he looked them over, and he looked a bit shocked, and then embarrassed, and he said, ‘Med, this is a care application. That’s your daughter, Donna-Faye? The State’s made an application to take her baby into care.’

  I said, ‘Yeah, I get that.’

  He said, ‘What’s gone on, Med?’

  I said, ‘I don’t rightly know. Fat – Donna-Faye – she phoned up Saturday morning and said Seth was in the hospital, chucking up and whatnot, and I went to hospital, and they wouldn’t let me see him, wouldn’t let any of us see him, said the baby had to go to John Hunter, and two women came in and said somebody must have hurt him, and gave Fat these papers and sent her home without the baby.

  Barry, he said, ‘Well, you need to find out what has happened here, mate, because this application, it’s to take your Seth into State care. It’s the first step to making him a State ward.’

  I said, ‘No grandchild of mine is going to be a State ward.’

  He said, ‘Well, that’s what’s underway.’

  I said,
‘What can I do about it, Barry?’ and like Kat, Barry said, ‘You need to get a lawyer’, but he wasn’t the kind of lawyer I needed. He said, ‘Med, mate, this kind of thing, it’s not my bag. You need somebody who knows their way around the Children’s Court.’

  I said, ‘Anybody you can recommend?’ and Barry thought for a minute, and said, ‘Look, there’s a practice in town. I can make a call for you’ and he went though the Rolodex, and found the number and phoned up, and I heard him explaining the situation, saying, ‘Yeah, welfare already involved’ and, ‘Yeah, the grandfather works here, he’s a good bloke, and he’s pulling out his hair’ and then looking embarrassed because aside from the beard, I don’t actually have much. He said, ‘Okay if I send him over?’ and then he nodded and put down the phone, picked up a pen and wrote down the address.

  He said, ‘She can’t make any promises, but she’s willing to have a look.’

  I said, ‘It’s a lady lawyer?’

  He said, ‘Yeah, but she’s good.’

  I took the address from him. I said, ‘This is just between us, right?’ and Barry, he said, ‘Med, we haven’t spoken.’

  I took the afternoon off and sat down with the lawyer and went over the situation again, and she had much the same to tell me. Seth was on his way to being a ward of the State.

  I said, ‘Can they just do that? I mean, they haven’t even told us what’s wrong with him.’

  She said, ‘They do it every day’ and in case you don’t know, actually that’s true. Probably I don’t need to tell you this, Your Honour, but the number of kids that are wards of the State in this country, well, you wouldn’t believe it. I’m talking 30,000. That’s no exaggeration. That’s more than when Pat was in the home, way back when. The only difference is, they don’t have kids in homes anymore. The homes are gone. They’ve got them fostered out instead, and from what the lady lawyer said, that’s what they had in mind for Seth, to take him from my daughter and give him away to somebody else.