I Came to Say Goodbye

by Caroline Overington

  Then she said, ‘No. Sudanese refugees. Families from Somalia and Sudanese people, most of them newly arrived in Australia, trying to find their feet.’

  For the second time that day, she had me floored. It was not that Fat would be living with Sudanese – that was no big deal, they’ve got to live somewhere, don’t they? But that we – Australia, I mean – were sending Sudanese people to Tamworth.

  I said, ‘Who’s idea was that?’ The caseworker, she said, ‘Well, it’s all part of the plan. Most of the new arrivals cannot read and write. They are illiterate in their own language. In some cases, they have never turned on a tap or flushed a toilet, or gone to a supermarket and used money. It takes some effort to assimilate them. The government spreads them around regional NSW, and Queensland, too, so everybody can help carry the burden.’

  I thought, I wonder what the hell the Sudanese make of that? I had in mind a vision of them walking around barefoot across the Kalahari with baskets on their heads one minute, and then boot-scootin’ around the Big Guitar in Tamworth the next.

  The caseworker said, ‘They keep pretty much to themselves but who knows, they might befriend Donna-Faye.’ I wondered about that.

  The first time I went to Tamworth, after Fat was moved there at the start of 2008, I saw a couple of Sudanese people walking down the road. They stood out on the landscape like you would not believe. They were the longest, tallest, blackest people I’d ever seen in my life, outside National Geographic, but with bright white eyes that were red around the rims, like they’d been crying.

  The way they walked, it was like they were warriors. They were so upright it was as if they still had baskets on their heads. I wondered what they’d talk to Donna-Faye about.

  I said to the caseworker – oh, yes, Fat had a caseworker in Tamworth, just like she did in Sydney, and it was never the same one – are they Muslim? I didn’t think of it as a racist question. It hadn’t been that long since the 9/11 attack, and then Bali had been blown up, and the war in Iraq was going on. Right or wrong, people were worried about Muslims, but the caseworker said, ‘I have no idea.’ That was bullshit, excuse my French. She just thought I was rude for asking. Maybe I was. Anyway, I found out for myself that most of them weren’t Muslims. They were Christians. Not all of them. I did see a couple of the women, dressed up like pepper grinders, sort of shuffling down the street, and I thought, okay, they’re not Christian, but some of the other women had crosses. I should also say that most of them were pretty good to me and to Fat, while she was there, and what happened between them and her … well, let’s just say for now that it was obviously wrong, what they did, it was totally out of line, but it’s not like we didn’t do worse.

  Fat’s unit was nice enough. It had a bedroom, an ensuite bathroom and a microwave. The rent was $25 a week and it came straight out of her disability pension. I hadn’t been happy about that – her being on the pension, I mean. I said, ‘Nobody in our lot has ever been on the dole.’ They said, ‘It’s not dole. It’s disability pension’ and they said Fat had to take it, otherwise she wouldn’t have the ID number she needed to get into Re-start in the first place, and so we signed up for it.

  I should also tell you, the times I went up to Tamworth before things went completely pear-shaped, Fat seemed pretty happy there. Like I’ve said, she wasn’t Fat like before she went to the mental ward. Looking back, there were signs of what was going on inside. She would rock back and forward. She would whisper, or else she’d come over hard of hearing, and you’d have to shout. Sometimes she’d be suspicious of me for offering to help with some perfectly ordinary thing, like getting milk out of the little fridge. Her sense of distance was out. She’d go to put something on the bench, and she’d miss, and it would break on the floor. Silly things like that, they add up to a lot.

  That said, the unit seemed a good place for her. She was free to come and go as she pleased. There were a few shops about where she could have a bit of a browse, and then, of course, she had her neighbours, the Sudanese. To me, that was interesting. They had a funny way of dressing – suit pants under dresses for the men – and they had barbecues out on the driveway, which smelled nice, but meant you couldn’t park the car.

  Under the Re-start rules, I couldn’t stay in with Fat. She wasn’t allowed visitors overnight, so when I went up, I’d set myself up at the pub. I knew from reading the Tamworth paper that the locals weren’t too happy about having the Sudanese people there and nine times in 10, some bloke in the pub would end up telling me that the Sudanese were causing all kinds of problems. They were in court for driving off without paying for petrol, or driving without a licence, or they were taking over the computers at the local library.

  Every bloke claimed to know a girl who had a friend who knew a nurse who worked at the Tamworth Hospital who was delivering babies to Sudanese girls who couldn’t have been more than 12 or 13 years old. They’d tell you how the babies had to be cut out of the mothers’ bellies because the mothers had been cut up and sewn shut and couldn’t deliver a baby in the normal way.

  People went on the internet and discovered that the camps in Kenya, where the Sudanese had been before they came to Australia, had TB. They wrote to the local newspapers, wanting to know whether the Australian government had screened for TB and they complained that the services that had been promised – the health services, the language services – were slow in coming.

  One weekend I was there, the principal at one of the local schools was complaining that ‘our kids’ were suffering because the Sudanese kids couldn’t read and write and needed so much help to catch up.

  I can’t say I had an opinion about the Sudanese people, not then. There was one thing I noticed, and it was that they did not necessarily get along. My idea had been, ‘They’re all from the same place, and they’re all in the same boat now’ and you’d think they’d be pulling together, but in fact they were warring with each other like you wouldn’t believe. A bloke at the pub told me, ‘It’s all tribal. They’re fighting battles that started 7000 years ago. Nobody even knows what it’s about anymore.’

  He said there wasn’t a doubt in the world that some of the bad ones – he said the ‘machete ones’ – got through the system and ended up in Australia. He meant some of the ones that had done the chopping and the raping and the killing in the wars in Africa had made it through as refugees, when in fact they were the ones who sent people fleeing in the first place. I told him he had the wrong country. These people weren’t from Rwanda.

  There were other points of view. One bloke I met in the pub was the owner of the local meatworks. He was rapt to have the Sudanese, and if 1600 more were coming – that was the rumour – well, he’d have been even more rapt. He had jobs on the kill floor that he had never been able to fill.

  ‘The Sudanese aren’t squeamish,’ he told me. ‘They’ll do anything.’

  From memory, I was on my fifth visit to Tamworth when I realised that Fat and the Sudanese – well, they weren’t actually keeping to themselves. I don’t know why I thought they would be but still, I got the shock of my life when I put my head around the door in Fat’s unit, and called out, ‘Yoohoo, it’s Dad’ and from the corner of my eye, I saw a Sudanese guy, long as a ladder, taking off from Fat’s kitchen, through the flyscreen door, and basically hurdling the back fence.

  I said to Fat, ‘What was that?’ She said, ‘That was Malok’ and I said, ‘And who’s Malok?’ She said, ‘He’s Malok.’ She could be like that. Hard to pin down.

  On the other hand, I wasn’t born yesterday. It was clearly a bloke who didn’t want to be seen, because otherwise why hurdle the fence? I said, ‘Is that your friend, Fat?’ and Fat said, ‘That’s Malok’ – as I say, that was the way she was talking then, basically like a child – and I said, ‘He doesn’t look that old’ and she said, ‘He doesn’t know how old he is’ and I assumed she was confused about that, because who doesn’t know how old they are? But I said, ‘Well, that’s nice, Fat, but I don’t get why h
e had to run off?’ and she said, ‘He’s Malok.’

  Did I think they had some other kind of relationship, other than him sniffing around my girl, probably because she was chubby and exotic? No, I did not. I mean, Fat was still half-asleep most of the time, and Malok was a kid – a big kid, no doubt about that, but still a kid and he could barely string together a sentence in the English language.

  I thought, I bet he comes here during the day, hoping to get a glimpse of Fat’s leg, or something like that. Maybe the women he knows are the type that wear the hijabby robes. I thought, Maybe he’s a snowdropper, taking her knickers off the line.

  Certainly, I didn’t think of him as somebody who was going to help upset the applecart in the way he did, and to be fair – I’m trying as hard as I can to be fair here – it wasn’t his fault. Like I say, he was just a kid, a late-teen teenager with raging testosterone, and no idea how to handle it, and the women in his family, well, they lived by their own rules.

  That said, I do remember, one time I was visiting Fat, trying to put a dryer onto the wall above the washing machine and I needed help. I’d gone to the next unit, and knocked on the door and when the African bloke answered, I’d mimed out what I needed – some of his height, basically, because he was a good two-foot taller than me – and he’d nodded and smiled and come over to Fat’s, and helped me lift the dryer into place, and when we were out the front, job done, having a cold glass of beer, Malok walked by, as if to turn up her garden path, but then he saw me and he decided to keep walking, and the Sudanese bloke who’d been helping me pointed after him. He had a long, crooked finger, pink at the tip. He shook his head and said, ‘No good, no good.’ Now, you don’t need to speak Swahili to get the message there, do you? He was saying, ‘Keep your girl away from that one, he’s bad news.’

  Then, six months into the Tamworth Re-start experiment, a woman from the health department called me and said she had ‘news’.

  I said, ‘What news?’ and after a bit of umming and ahhing, she said, ‘Well, basically Mr Atley, Donna-Faye is pregnant.’

  I have to tell you, Your Honour, I was knocked on my bottom. Winded. And, given what had happened with Seth, horrified.

  I said, ‘You are kidding, I hope?’ I even thought, How? I mean, I know how it happens, but I still thought, How could they have let that happen? Wasn’t the point of the Re-start program to keep Fat out of trouble? Hadn’t she got to Tamworth after breaking down over the loss of Seth?

  The caseworker was apologetic – to a point. That’s another thing I’ve found about mental health. It’s all good in theory, the treatments and the programs that they have, but when they go wrong, nobody takes responsibility. Nobody is to blame.

  She said, ‘Well, Donna-Faye’s an adult’ and I thought, She’s an adult in your care! I said, ‘I thought she was going to be safe in this program’ and the caseworker, she said, ‘Well, she’s not injured. She’s expecting a baby’ … and then she cleared her throat, and I knew there was more coming.

  She said, ‘As Donna-Faye’s guardian, there’s something else you need to know.’

  I said, ‘Well, hit me with it.’ What else could there possibly be?

  She said, ‘Well, it seems that the father of Donna-Faye’s baby is the son of one of the local Sudanese.’

  That took a minute to digest. I said, ‘He’s the son of one of the Sudanese?’

  She said, ‘That’s what Donna-Faye has told us.’

  I said, ‘When you say, son …?’

  She said, ‘Yes, from what Donna-Faye has said, the father is Malok Ibrahim, and if that’s so, then Malok’s not yet 18. He may not, in fact, be 17.’

  Well, I thought, that’s just peachy. That’s just keen. Not a year after she’d lost Seth, Fat was pregnant. Not only that, the father was a Sudanese refugee. Not only that, he was a minor.

  I shouldn’t have got angry with the poor lady on the telephone. Believe me when I say I’m not normally the type to get angry, but on that occasion I did. I said, ‘Do you people have any idea what you’re doing? Heaven’s above, the whole purpose of your program was to keep Fat safe.’

  Part of my anger was grief, obviously. I mean, I knew even before they told me that there was no way that Fat would be allowed to keep the baby she was carrying. I knew that because of what people who used to hang out on our website told me. Not after what had happened to Seth, not after she’d been found wandering naked in the traffic, not after she’d caused a bus to run off the road, not after she’d been committed and was on medication, and living in assisted accommodation.

  I called Edna and said, ‘You mark my words, they’ll come for this baby, just like they came for the last one.’

  Edna said, ‘Don’t be silly, Med, people can’t just up and take a baby from its mother.’

  I said, ‘Don’t you read the news? They do it all the time’ and it’s true, Your Honour, you know it’s true. I blame the media. It’s the media that’s made a crazy spectacle of child abuse. It’s the media that carries on when somebody hurts a child, and now the Department has this weird power, where it can take any baby it wants. You have one baby taken away, they’ll come for the next one, too. They won’t run the risk that you’ll hurt it.

  I could hardly bear to face Fat with that news, but when the time came to explain it all to Fat, she didn’t seem to care – care is not the right word, but it’s the only one I can think of. She just said, ‘Oh, okay.’

  Did she understand? I doubt it. I mean, not long after we had that chat, a bloke came by to deliver a cradle, one he said he didn’t need anymore. After he was gone, I had to say, ‘Fat, you know they’re not going to let you bring this baby home, don’t you?’ She nodded. She said, ‘I know that, Dad’ but when she thought I wasn’t looking she went back to the cot, and fussed with sheets. To see her doing that hurt so much. I had to go outside.

  Once the decision to take the baby from Fat had been made, the question became, who will take the baby? We didn’t think the father – the boy, Malok – would be allowed to do it. He was in worse straits than Donna-Faye. He had no income and he couldn’t read or write. As far as I knew, he didn’t even have an Australian passport.

  With the mother and the father ruled out, the Department turned to the next of kin, which basically meant me. I told the caseworker, I am Fat’s guardian, and the grandfather, so the baby can come home with me, at least until Fat gets better. They ruled that out. They said, Med, you’re too old. I knew straightaway that couldn’t be the real reason. Plenty of grandparents have their kids to look after, don’t they? Plenty of them are older than me. I said, ‘What’s the real reason?’ They said, ‘Well, Donna-Faye’s had the test, and the baby is a girl.’ I said, ‘So the baby’s a girl, and?’ They said, ‘Well, the Department doesn’t usually place a baby girl with a single man.’

  I said, ‘You think I’m a child molester?’ I said, ‘You people have some strange ideas.’ I cursed Pat. I thought, you ran off and left me with a baby and now you’re gone, I’m not good enough to care for a baby. But there was no point arguing about it, obviously. Once the Department makes a decision, you can spend every cent you have fighting it, and good luck with how far you get. I said, ‘What is the Department’s plan?’ I knew they’d have one. They always do.

  They said, ‘We are willing to assess other members of Donna-Faye’s family, as potential guardians.’ In English, that means I was supposed to come up with somebody in the family who would take the baby.

  My first thought was Blue because, to me, Blue ticked all the boxes. He was still in his 30s, and he was married by then, and I’m pretty sure their eldest was already born. Blue’s wife is Koori. Their children are coffee-coloured, like Fat’s baby was obviously going to be coffee-coloured … but even as all this was going through my mind, I knew they’d never approve Blue. They’d take one look at his place out on the Ridge, the campsite with the drop toilet and the tank water and the tarps, and they’d scan around the neighbours – the fortune hunte
rs, the dreamers – and the barefoot kids, and they’d say, ‘Well, he doesn’t meet our standards.’

  There was something else, too, Blue had a record. I’ve never mentioned that to anyone. I don’t see that it’s anyone’s business. I wouldn’t mention it now, except I’m determined to be up-front. It’s to do with something that happened a year or so after he moved to the Ridge, when he was young man, still a bit wet behind the ears.

  The Ridge is one of those places where the men outnumber women. There weren’t many girls about. If I know Blue, he wouldn’t have made a habit of going to the knocking shop, but he did go one time, and a girl took his eye. She told him it was her first night. She hoped her first client would be a decent bloke. Was she making that up? I’d say it’s odds on, but Blue gave her money and didn’t have sex with her. Did he think he was in love? Maybe, or maybe it was like with the pups on the property, when he was boy. If there was an animal crying, he had to help. He told this girl, ‘Come to my camp; I’ll take care of you.’ Of course she said yes, yes, but she needed some money to pay off her debt to the owner of the knocking shop, and the next night, when she didn’t turn up at the camp and he went looking for her, where was she? At the knocking shop, with some other joker getting the ‘It’s my first night’ routine. Blue got upset. They threw him out on his arse. When he tried to get back in, using a boot against the door, they called the cops, and for that, he got a record.

  I thought, it sounds to me like the kind of record some men – good men – will always get. But I also knew that it would show up in the assessment – hookers, jail – and Blue would be a goner, at least as far as Fat’s baby was concerned, and maybe the bureaucrats, who just love sniffing around, would start thinking about the state of his lodgings in relation to his own kids, too.

  That left me with one option: Kat.

  Now, Your Honour, I hope that Kat will forgive me for saying this, but I hesitated before I put her name forward, the main concern being I wasn’t sure she’d say yes. I mean, Kat’s my firstborn, and she’s my daughter, and of course I love her, and I’m proud of what she’s achieved, but the truth is, I thought she’d say, ‘I’m sorry, Dad, but I don’t want anything to do with this mess.’