I Came to Say Goodbye

by Caroline Overington

  I said, ‘So, what do I do to put the brakes on this?’ and she said, ‘Well, you’ve got a battle on your hands’ and I said, ‘But how can that be? How can they just take a baby?’ and she said, ‘Well, look at it from their point of view. Seth’s got a serious injury and nobody can say how he got it. What would you do if you worked for welfare?’

  I said, ‘I wouldn’t say straightaway oh, let’s take the baby away. That doesn’t sound right to me.’

  The lawyer, she looked at the paperwork again and said, ‘Well, if they think one of the parents shook the baby, or dropped the baby or hurt the baby somehow, I don’t see what choice they’ve got.’

  I said, ‘But you’ve got it all wrong. Fat wouldn’t hurt Seth. Fat’s absolutely over the moon with Seth. It’s agony not having him with her.’

  She said, ‘But Fat doesn’t live alone, does she?’ and then she said, ‘This bloke your daughter lives with, what’s he like?’ Well, what could I say? That he was an absolute no-hoper? A drunk and a drug addict with an aversion to a hard day’s work? But that Fat seemed to think that the sun shone out of his arse?

  I said, ‘Well, let’s put it this way. He wouldn’t be my choice.’

  She said, ‘Might he have done something to the baby?’

  I said, ‘Well, look, he’s not good for much, but to be honest with you, I can’t believe anyone would do anything to a little baby.’ I mean, deliberately hurt a little baby? That was seriously the way I was thinking. How could anyone have hurt Seth? He was only just learning how to hold up his head. He still had that strange way of sleeping, where his hands would move like they were conducting an orchestra. Hurt him? You’ve got to be kidding. It was all I could do not to bawl when I saw him.

  The lawyer said, ‘Well, people can surprise you, Med.’

  I said, ‘I can tell you the chance that Fat’s done anything, it’s got to be nil, and they’re keeping that baby away from his mother. He’s got to need his mother.’

  The lawyer sighed, and she said, ‘Well, whatever the rights and wrongs of it, that’s what they’ve got planned and at all costs, I’d try to avoid this baby going into State care, Med, because my experience is, when a child goes into State care, it’s difficult to get them out.’

  I said, ‘Well, my grandson is not becoming a ward. That’s just not an option’, and I explained how I’d raised Fat after my wife took off, and I’d take Seth and raise him myself before I’d let the State have him.

  She said, ‘Oh, Med, if only it were that simple.’

  I said, ‘Will you take the case?’ and she said, ‘Well, Barry says you’re a good bloke’ and she smiled at me, and for some reason, that made me feel a bit more confident about where we were at. I thought, if this lawyer – and Barry had said she was a good lawyer – was prepared to take the case, maybe we had a chance.

  See how much I didn’t know? I didn’t know that lawyers, they take cases. That’s their job. They take cases because they get paid.

  Anyway, I left her office and I drove home. I phoned up Fat, and the phone rang out, so I phoned again and phoned again. I figured they had to be home. Where else would they be? It was Haines who finally picked up. I stopped him before he could say, ‘Med, piss off.’ I got in first. I said, ‘Look, Paul, forget about the other night, I’ve got a lawyer for you.’

  Haines hesitated. He hesitated, and then he said, ‘We don’t need a lawyer, Med.’

  I said, ‘Do you have a better idea?’

  He said, ‘We’ve got justice on our side.’

  I said, ‘It won’t hurt for you to speak to her. I will pay. She’s a nice lady. We’ll just make sure we all understand what’s going on and what we have to do.’

  For once in his life, Haines didn’t argue. I made an appointment for the three of us – Fat, Haines and me – to see her again, and by the time that appointment came around, we’d had another letter from the court, this one telling us what was going on in the minds of the bureaucrats. It said that Seth was a victim of the Shaken Baby Syndrome. Now, I should say here, I’d never heard of Shaken Baby Syndrome, not before I read that letter. I didn’t know what it was. It’s pretty rare. It’s also pretty new. Sixty years ago, they didn’t have it. Or else they had it, but they called it something else.

  It was the lawyer who told us what it was. She said it was when the parents took the baby by the shoulders, and gave it a good rattle to make it shut up.

  She said some people – new parents, mostly – they get so frustrated with a crying baby, they shake it, and they don’t know it’s a deadly thing to do. They don’t understand they are rattling the baby’s brain around, doing real damage.

  I thought, well, that explains what those two women at Forster General were on about, with all their questions about how frustrating it is to have a baby in the house.

  I looked at Fat. If she heard what the lawyer was saying, her face didn’t show it. Her expression even then, it was often blank.

  The lawyer said, ‘The Department isn’t saying which one of the parents they hold responsible, only that they believe that somebody shook the baby, and since neither of you admit to it, they don’t want to run the risk of it happening again.’

  Haines said, ‘Yeah, well that’s bullshit.’

  Fat said, ‘I just want my baby back.’

  Our lawyer looked at Fat, and she flashed that smile that she’d given me. She said, ‘Well, of course, Donna-Faye. That’s absolutely why we are here, to get your baby back.’

  She reached into her top drawer. She brought out a contract. It was all about what we would pay to get Seth back. It was a pretty penny. But, she said, that was ‘the easy part’. There were other contracts, too. If we won, we’d sue, and if we won money, she’d get 48 per cent.

  ‘But that all comes later,’ she said. ‘For now, let’s concentrate on bringing Seth home.’

  Chapter 8

  IT WASN’T LONG BEFORE THE FIRST day of the hearing about Seth came around. I’d had to park the car a mile away from the Children’s Court, the one in Parramatta. I had to run down the street in my suit – again with the tan suit, although just the pants this time, and a white cotton shirt, which I was hoping wasn’t too yellow under the arms – so I wouldn’t miss the start.

  I shouldn’t have bothered. I wouldn’t have missed the start. I shouldn’t have bothered with the suit either. I mean, nobody else bothered to get dressed up, not even if they were fighting for their own kid.

  One example – there was a woman sitting on the steps out front when I arrived, with her feet basically in the gutter and her head between her knees. I know I’m not supposed to notice these things, but her boobs were falling out. She had a Jim Beam singlet on, and no bra, and her boobs were falling out. Like Haines, she had tattoos all over her hands. Hers were swallows.

  I thought, is she drunk? I mean, it was 9 am but her head was lolling around, and she was moaning. She wasn’t drunk though. She was grief-stricken, and nobody was helping her. I wasn’t sure what do to. I looked around, and it was clear that nobody else was going to intercede, so I went over and bent down and said, ‘Ma’am? Can I help you, Ma’am?’

  She looked up at me. She looked like a racoon. Her eye make-up, it was smudged down her face. She said, ‘They took my bloody baby!’

  I was pretty shocked. I said, ‘Who took your baby?’ She said, ‘They did. The effing system (except she didn’t say effing, she said the real thing). The courts. The cops. The effing system.’

  I was thinking about what to say to her, what to do, really, when another woman started coming down the stairs. She was dressed properly. She had on a skirt, with a jacket. She was a big lady, but she looked neat. She had a briefcase.

  The woman with the swallows on her hands, she looked up, and she saw this woman and she started spitting – I mean, literally spitting on the ground. She said, ‘There she is, the baby-snatcher. There she is, the dog. There she is, the mole. That’s what welfare looks like in the State of NSW. That’s the dog, the
mole.’

  She said, ‘I’ve got nothin’ to lose now, bitch’ and, ‘Better watch your back, bitch’ and, ‘I’ll be getting Byron back and you can suck my old man’s dick, mole.’

  The woman with the briefcase didn’t look up. She walked down the stairs without turning back and went up the street and when she was gone, the tattooed woman turned to me and said, ‘Have you got a cigarette?’

  I gave her one. What else could I do? I gave her one.

  I looked at my watch. I was late. I headed up the stairs into the building. There was security at the front door, like at airports. I put my wallet and my keys on the conveyor belt, and got waved through by those wands. I went up an escalator. It wasn’t like a normal court. There were no blokes walking around in horsehair wigs. There was no fancy wood panelling.

  There were TVs mounted on the walls, flashing the names of the cases, like airport arrivals. I could see ‘Atley-Haines’ so I knew where to go. We were in court six. I felt a bit anxious. I thought, ‘I’ll just go the loo.’ I don’t know if you’ve seen it but the toilets at the Children’s Court in Parramatta are covered in graffiti. Covered, like a mural. The cleaners must have given up. Most of it is permanent marker. I read some of it. One person had written, ‘You find yourself in this place, you might as well kiss your kids goodbye.’ Another said, ‘Welfare workers steal your kids and give them to Koori carers to cover their own arse.’

  I thought, ‘How has this happened? Us Atleys, we’re good people. How did we end up in a place like this, dealing with this kind of mess?’

  I did my business. I made my way out of there. I found court six. I was just in time to see Haines meandering over, in his Adidas pants and his moccasins. He was talking loudly.

  He said, ‘Can you believe it, Med? Got held up by security. Bastards took my Swiss army knife.’

  I thought, he’s kidding. He was not kidding. He was exactly the kind of moron that would take a Swiss army knife into the Children’s Court.

  He said, ‘I better get it back.’

  Fat was trailing behind him. Her face was swollen from crying. She was saying, ‘It’s alright, Paul.’

  I thought, He’s upset about the knife?

  She said, ‘The security guard told us to remind them on the way out.’

  It was all I could do not to say, and hey, maybe we can get Seth on the way out too? I said, ‘Are you alright, Fat?’ I put my arm around her. She was bigger than me around the middle. Like I’ve said before, she just carries weight. She shrugged. She said, ‘I’m okay.’

  Haines said, ‘I’m bloody not. I’ve had that knife five years.’

  Our lawyer wasn’t outside court six. Neil Cowan was there, though. I know what you are thinking. Who the bloody hell is Neil Cowan? I might as well tell you, since I’m the one who was responsible for getting him there. Neil Cowan is a quack.

  I found him on the internet. I wish I hadn’t, but I did. It was Kat that gave me the idea. A couple of years after she moved overseas, when she was back on some short break, she put a computer in what was Blue’s room, and she organised some kind of connection with Telstra. She showed me how you pulled the cord out of the back of the phone and stuck it in the back of the computer and you could get the internet. She was raving about how great it would be, sending emails and photos and whatnot. To be honest with you, I stayed away from the thing for years. I’d unplug the phone to use it, and forget what to do next, and then forget to plug the phone back in and Edna would come around and say the line’s been busy for two days. So it was more of a nuisance than anything. But then when all this started, so many people said to me, oh, you should look on the internet. There’s so much information on the internet. So I made an effort and I got a connection and I put in ‘Shaken Baby Syndrome’ and this bloke, Neil Cowan, he’d popped up. He had a whole page on it.

  From what I read, it seemed like he was an expert. He said Shaken Baby Syndrome was a myth. Not just a myth. A fraud. He said it wasn’t real, and welfare departments, like the Department of Community Services, made it up so they could steal babies from poor homes, to keep social workers employed.

  Looking back now, I can see that Neil Cowan was deranged in some way. He was obsessed with governments and conspiracies and cover-ups and fraud. But I couldn’t see that back then. What I saw then was that he’d put realms of material about Shaken Baby Syndrome on the internet, and he had a phone number in Sydney, and I was so desperate for help, I would have grabbed at anything. I remember phoning him from my place – pulling the plug out of the computer, putting it back in the phone – thinking, he’s a doctor, he probably won’t be easy to reach, but maybe I’ll be able to leave a message with his receptionist and maybe he’ll call back.

  Well, there was no receptionist. Neil Cowan himself picked up the phone. He said, ‘Neil Cowan’ and, surprised, I said, ‘Are you the doctor on the Shaken Baby website?’ and it was like he came alive.

  He said, ‘Yes, yes, that’s me’ and I said, ‘Well, I’m Med Atley’ and I explained what we were up against, and straightaway, he started saying oh yes, classic, classic, that is so classic, like classic was his favourite word in the world.

  He said, ‘Oh, this is a classic case’ and then he said, ‘Where are you?’ and I said, ‘Forster’ and he said, ‘Allow me to come up there. I’m compelled to hear more about this.’ I thought, uh oh, how much is this going to cost? I said, ‘What are your fees?’ but Cowan said no, no, no, don’t misunderstand me, I don’t want money, I want to help you, this is a classic case, a classic example, you really don’t understand what a classic example of the Shaken Baby myth this is, and he invited himself up to Forster, to our lawyer’s office, and to my credit, I think, the moment he walked in, I did think, uh oh, because there was something not quite right about him. I wish I could explain it better than that, but something just wasn’t right, in terms of the way he presented himself when he was supposedly a doctor, a professional, an expert. His pants were a bit too short and too tight, like they were from an old suit that didn’t fit right, or else one that belonged to somebody else, maybe a smaller brother, and he had pens in the top pocket of his shirt, all lined up, and my experience is, nobody who actually works does that with pens, because those things, they leak, and that’s something you find out on the first week in the job, and you don’t do again.

  He sat down and he took a pen from his line of pens, and he said, ‘Ned, I’ve decided to make your case the test case, the one that will go all the way to the High Court’ and our lawyer, she nearly spat out her tea. She said, ‘The High Court? We haven’t even been to the Children’s Court.’

  But Neil Cowan, he wouldn’t be swayed. He said, no, no, this is the classic case, this is the one I’ve been looking for, the one we need to smash this conspiracy wide open, and then he launched into what I figured was his usual spiel, the one his mates (if he has any) must threaten to bash him for, if he raises it again, about how Shaken Baby Syndrome is bogus and how he’d been looking for a case for a while that would help him prove it, and this one was classic, just classic, and what he intended to do was show that Seth’s injuries weren’t caused by shaking and how what he’d prove instead was that these brain injuries were caused by vaccinations.

  He said, ‘Had Seth had his shots?’

  Well, of course Seth had his shots. He’d had his three-month shots not five days before he went to hospital, and when Cowan heard that, he practically jumped out of his chair, saying, ‘See, see, and they’ll tell you there is no connection between the shots and the brain injury! It’s classic, just classic! There is so much evidence that these shots cause brain damage, but the drug companies, they don’t want to admit it, because every baby in the western world is getting shots and that’s a lucrative business. So what’s happening is parents are turning up at hospital with babies that had been jabbed with all kinds of poison, and the hospitals are saying, “Did you shake this baby?” because they were in cahoots with the drug companies.’ Having said that, Ne
il Cowan slapped his hand down on the lawyer’s desk, and made us all jump.

  Haines said, ‘Well why can’t we just go in there and say we didn’t do anything? They’ve got no proof we did.’

  Did you get that, Your Honour? They’ve got no proof we did.

  But Neil Cowan, he wouldn’t be swayed. He said, no, no, no, he’d been studying this for a long time. Vaccinations were poison and the drug companies knew it and governments knew it and Seth’s case, it was just classic, classic, and he said, ‘This will give me the ammunition I need to blow this conspiracy apart’ and then he pulled out a letter and showed me the letterhead, which said ‘Office of the Prime Minister and Cabinet’ and he said, ‘I’ve been in touch with people at the highest level, and they have acknowledged my work in this area!’

  I had a quick look through the letter. I didn’t want to be rude but to me, it looked like one of the letters we used to send people from the Shire, when they wanted us to come and cut their lawns and we couldn’t come and cut their lawns, because it’s not our business to cut private lawns. It was basically a letter that said, ‘Thanks for the incredibly boring material you’ve sent us about this, we’ve filed it away, and now please, piss off.’

  I handed the letter back to Neil Cowan, and I was actually on the verge of saying, look, maybe this isn’t the best idea, maybe you shouldn’t testify for us after all, but there was just no stopping him when his mouth started to run, and it was Haines who finally said, ‘Yeah, okay, we get it’ and I felt a bit embarrassed, but Cowan, he didn’t seem put out at all, like he was used to people telling him to shut up.

  I did venture one question: Why would the welfare department want to steal babies from their mothers? Cowan, he acted like he had that all worked out. He said, ‘Imagine, Ned, if there was no Shaken Baby Syndrome! What would happen to all the social workers? What would happen to the occupational therapists, the speech therapists, the cognitive therapists, the lawyers and the judges? They wouldn’t have jobs!’