I Came to Say Goodbye

by Caroline Overington

  In any case, off we went, down the hall, towards Donna-Faye’s suite. She veered off course only once, to look at an enormous bear, slumped in the corner of a room so filled with flowers it looked like a florist.

  ‘Look what they gave this lady for her baby!’ she said. Then she looked at her Eastern Private bear, like she’d somehow been short-changed.

  If Donna-Faye was doing some stickybeaking, it’s fair to say some nurses were, too. I don’t blame them. We were a curiosity. There was Donna-Faye, five-foot-nothing, round as a beach ball and white as a glove, and next to her, gangly Malok, long as licorice.

  Donna-Faye’s suite was the last along the corridor. The matron settled Donna-Faye onto the edge of her bed. She was so round, she had to keep her knees apart. She had been carrying the menu since we’d picked it up a week earlier. Now she said, ‘Can I order anything?’ and the matron said, ‘Yes, of course you may’ and Fat got to it, ticking yes to barramundi, and yes to crème brulee, and yes to prawn cocktails, and yes to crackers and cheese. My father took a seat in the recliner. He said, ‘I’ll take care of what she doesn’t eat. I’m starving.’

  The matron said, ‘I’m going to give you a little something to keep you calm’ and put some pills into Donna-Faye’s hand, and then passed her a glass of water. She said, ‘The doctor will be along shortly’ and left the room. Donna-Faye lay down and closed her eyes. David switched on the flat screen. Somebody called Mel and Kochie were doing a morning show. I filled out some of the paperwork for Donna-Faye, and handed it to my father to sign. He was still her legal guardian.

  After a while, two orderlies came for Donna-Faye. They helped her onto a trolley and wheeled her down the hall. We all followed. They stripped back her nightie, and exposed her belly and painted anaesthetic on it. They covered her skin with stickers that were connected to wires connected to machines. I felt so anxious I could hardly breathe. Over and again, I said, ‘Are you okay, Donna-Faye? Are you okay?’

  Who can say what she knew at that point?

  David was his gentle best. He said, ‘Step back, honey. Let them do what they have to do.’ The orderly said, ‘Oh, it’ll be hours yet. The doctor hasn’t even arrived. We’re just moving her closer to the business end of the ward.’

  David said, ‘I’m going to go for a walk around.’ He can’t bear waiting. He told me later that he stumbled upon Malok in the hall. The poor boy had refused to go into the room where Donna-Faye was lying like a flattened seal, stained yellow and naked.

  ‘He was standing like a broom against the wall,’ David said. ‘Jet black with a blue hairnet, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else, with those social worker witches hunched up in the chairs beside him.’

  My father went walkabout for a while, too. He found a tearoom and made himself a cuppa. He got talking to one of the nurses, saying, ‘My daughter’s having a baby today.’

  The nurse said, ‘Well, congratulations.’

  Dad said, ‘I actually have to be in there for the birth. I’m the legal guardian. So I saw her born, and now I’ll see her give birth.’

  Dad was very proud of that.

  The nurse looked a bit confused, so he gave her the short history. He was Donna-Faye’s father, but also her guardian, and when the baby arrived, it wouldn’t go home with Donna-Faye, but with her sister, Kat, and so on …

  The nurse said, ‘Oh, yes, I did hear about that one. She’s on today, is she?’ and they fell into a conversation. I’m sure I can guess how it would have gone. Dad would have asked how much it cost to have a baby in the Eastern Private and the nurse would have said, ‘Oh, 10 grand’ and my father would have done one of his long whistles and said, ‘That’s more than my car’s worth’. At some point, the nurse apparently said, ‘Why do you call your daughter fat? She’s not fat, she’s pregnant!’

  My father said, ‘No, we called her Fat before she was pregnant.’

  The nurse said, ‘Was she fat before?’ and it’s true, I suppose, that we were all so used to it in the family we’d forgotten how it must have sounded to people who didn’t know Donna-Faye.

  The nurse also wanted to know why Donna-Faye wasn’t allowed to keep Savannah with her after she was born. Dad had to explain that Fat – Donna-Faye – had a mental illness. I know my father. He would have waited for the nurse to look horrified, and being a nurse, she wouldn’t have been at all horrified. She said, ‘Don’t be embarrassed. So many people go though the same thing.’ She told him stories about hospitals where she’d worked in Moree, where the mothers ‘don’t make a peep’ when welfare comes for their babies.

  ‘They accept it,’ she said. ‘They are told the government knows best.’

  Dad wandered back after that, as did David. We waited some more. Donna-Faye was flat-out, ready to be sliced open. Nurses were buzzing about, excited by the prospect of delivering Savannah.

  Finally the doctor arrived, and Donna-Faye was wheeled into a delivery suite. I stood to Donna-Faye’s left, behind her head, holding her hand. The anaesthetist rolled her onto her side, and inserted the needle for the epidural, and then rolled her back onto her back. He looked at his watch, and after a minute or so passed, he started scratching at her belly, and pinching her skin, saying, ‘Can you feel that? What about that?’ When it was clear that Donna-Faye couldn’t feel anything at all, he nodded to the obstetrician, who picked up a scalpel, and sliced Donna-Faye across the top of her shaved pubic area. The knife went through like butter.

  From where I was standing, I could see the surgeon’s blue gloves reaching deep into Donna-Faye’s belly. There was a fair amount of blood, and then, up from the muck, came Savannah. She was covered in mucus, and her pink mouth was open. She was waving her fists like she was furious, and she was trying hard to find her voice so she could scream.

  I thought, She is so beautiful.

  That’s not just me saying that. Every news report has said how beautiful Savannah was. She had rusty spirals all over her head, and her skin was the colour of a blood plum.

  I don’t need to tell you that I fell in love with her. Of course I fell in love with her.

  There was a bit to do after the birth. I suppose there always is. The obstetrician had to close up Donna-Faye; Savannah had to be bathed, and weighed. I looked for a place where I’d be out of the way, and when I turned, I saw that the two social workers that had brought Malok to the hospital had entered the room and were waving their pink and yellow documents about. They were saying they were the legal guardians of the newborn and they wanted access.

  A young nurse stepped forward. Dad told me later it was the one he’d had a cuppa with. She put her hands up and said, ‘Please, you can’t be in here.’ She tried to guide them towards the rubber doors. The doctor who had been trying to stitch Donna-Faye was saying, ‘Leave! Leave!’ Savannah was hiccuping, and then wailing. Malok was standing mute and confused, near the door. It was, in other words, quite a commotion.

  Only Donna-Faye stayed calm. Never mind that she was lying there with her entrails still out, she simply accepted the chaos going on around her, just as she’d accepted the pregnancy, accepted that she was being cut open to give birth, accepted there was a baby in the room she wasn’t allowed to hold.

  David wasn’t calm. He used his chest to back the social workers out of the room. I reached into my bag to find a mobile telephone. I was threatening to call our lawyer. That got me hustled out of the room, too. The social workers kept saying, ‘the court says we’re the legal guardians’ and I suppose they were quite right about that.

  We had thought, when we won the battle to have Savannah come home with us, that it meant we could take her home straightaway. We were floored when the Department told us it didn’t work that way. Actually, was it my imagination, or did they seem to be delighted that it did not work that way? Two social workers told us there was paperwork to complete, before a child was handed from the Department’s care to permanent care. The arrangement had to be sanctioned by the court. We said, ‘But the cou
rt has already ruled on this. We are Savannah’s permanent carers, for the rest of her life.’

  They said, ‘Yes, but the decision was made before Savannah was born. Now the court needs to see her birth certificate, and your birth certificate, and Donna-Faye’s, and the agreement that the Department has drawn up, and all of that has to be stamped and approved, and until it is, Savannah remains in our care.’

  It was a ridiculous system, obviously. We tried to argue with them. We said, ‘What is the point of taking her from us, when she will end up back with us?’ Because what made it worse was that Savannah wouldn’t be allowed to stay in hospital with Donna-Faye during that time, and she wouldn’t be allowed to stay with us, either. When I asked why not, the Department said Donna-Faye has been stripped of her parental rights. She is not the child’s guardian, and you aren’t either, not until the paperwork goes through. Technically, she’s a ward of the State until you get your papers stamped.

  They seemed so smug about it.

  I was quite enraged. I said, ‘So what on earth is supposed to happen to her? She’s nobody’s child, is that what you’re saying?’

  They said, ‘No, she’s in the care of the Minister, which means we will be placing her in foster care until all the paperwork is in order.’

  I could hardly believe it. It seemed wrong to me – so wrong! – to take a baby girl from her biological mother and place her with a stranger, for what? Four days? Five days? A week? That time is so important. Those days are when the baby really bonds with a caregiver. So the Department had designed a system to allow Savannah to bond with somebody else, whom she’d never see again, and to break her bond with me, who would be her mother, for the rest of her life.

  David said we’d take the matter to court, but courts being what they are, there was just no time. Our own barrister said, ‘We’ll never get in there in time. By the time you get a hearing, it will be time for you to take Savannah. Do you think you can bear it?’

  I didn’t think I could. Imagine it: your baby taken from the hospital, and gone God knows where? Because you’ve got no right to know. They won’t divulge the name of the foster carer to you. They say, ‘Oh, no, we can’t do that. It’s a privacy issue.’ I was shouting at them. I said, ‘How can we be sure that they are taking care of her?’ The lady on the phone said, ‘We have a procedure for registering all our carers’ and so on, and on, as if that would comfort me, and, ‘they have had police checks’ which made my hair stand on end and, ‘they have experience caring for newborns’ which made it sound like a procession of babies going through there, like a sausage factory.

  We argued our heads off, but it made no difference. We said it was ridiculous and cruel. The conversations got quite heated and once I had seen Savannah, and held Savannah, and smelled Savannah, I could not imagine handing her over to the care of people who seemed, to me, obsessed with rules and power, and not with the welfare of our little girl. But the Department said, ‘The rules are the rules. Savannah cannot go home with you until the placement is certified by the court, and she cannot stay in the hospital because she is not sick. She will have to stay with registered carers.’

  ‘I told them, yes, but who? Where? I wasn’t entitled to know any of these things, and Donna-Faye wasn’t told either. It took an enormous amount of wrangling simply to get the Department to say the couple were ‘very nice’ and lived ‘north of the Bridge’ and that’s all they would say, and they intended to take her on the day of her birth.

  I will always thank God for the intervention of the nursing staff, in particular the matron who was on duty that day. She point blank told them there was nobody there to accept their documents and organise the transfer, and they would have to come back, not the next day but the day after. Oh, they tried to insist, saying it was a contempt of court to ignore the order, but the matron, in her white shoes, stood firm. She said, ‘I’m sorry, there is nobody here to authorise it, and you cannot take a baby from the ward without the hospital’s permission.’

  ‘I was in awe, hearing her stand up to them. Social workers can be frightening. Later, she told me she simply couldn’t let a newborn infant, still with a crusted umbilical cord, an infant who hadn’t yet started nursing, leave the hospital. It would be abuse, is what she said. I said, ‘Child abuse?’ and she said, ‘Not only child abuse. Abuse of the mother.’

  I felt a stab through the heart when she said that. I shouldn’t have, but I did. Donna-Faye was Savannah’s mother. It’s just that I already felt that I was, too.

  In any case, it was because of that proud matron that David, Donna-Faye and I were able to spend the first days of Savannah’s life with Savannah, in the hospital. David slept in the armchair. Savannah slept in her Perspex cot, the one that doubled as a baby bath. Donna-Faye had the bed. I slept on the floor.

  We took turns to change Savannah, and to hold Savannah and rock Savannah, to bathe and burp Savannah. When I say we, I mean, David and me, and Dad, too, when he was in visiting, which was all the time.

  We’d look at each other and say, ‘I can’t believe she’s here.’ Again, I mean David and I would say that. Donna-Faye seemed not to know that Savannah was there, at least not all the time.

  I attended most of the classes for new mothers. Donna-Faye didn’t want to do it. I don’t mean she objected. She simply showed no interest. Perhaps she was exhausted? She certainly seemed to sleep a lot. Meanwhile, I knew I had much to learn. I knew it from the first day I held Savannah and she started to cry and I thought, Okay, who do I hand her to? And it dawned on me, to nobody. It was up to me to comfort her.

  There were practical things I needed to learn, too. How hot was too hot, for bath water? How cold was too cold? I went to the classes, and listened intently. A nurse showed us – me, and the other new mums, plenty of them still swelled from pregnancy, looking like they hadn’t yet given birth, and all of us so tired – how to put a drop of water on the inside of our wrists, to test the temperature before we put our babies in the bath.

  She taught me how to hold Savannah so her head wouldn’t fall back, and how to cup water in my hands, to scoop over her. I was worried about her umbilical cord, dry and dark like a burnt match. The nurse taught me how to bathe the velvet skin around it, and told me that one day, I’d go to take Savannah from the cot, and it would be gone, stuck to her nappy, maybe, or else somewhere in her bed, and if I was lucky, I’d find it, but plenty of people didn’t.

  I saw other mothers at the newborn classes. They were besotted with their newborns, and as confused as me, and sometimes, I saw them sneaking a glimpse at Savannah. Maybe they were thinking, How does that work? White mother, white father, chocolate-coloured baby? They’d talk about their birth stories – they were still in robes, most of them, with cotton slippers on their swollen feet – and I was there in pants and a sweater, not joining in.

  None of them came out and said, ‘What’s going on?’ The ward wasn’t like that, it was filled with women feeling tender, special, blessed. One or two of the new mums did come by and peek into our cot, and said, ‘She’s gorgeous’ or ‘She’s beautiful’ and I knew they were speaking the truth.

  Of course the social workers came back, just as they’d promised to do. They came back twice, actually. The first time they said they had a legal right to examine Savannah and took her from the room. I had to bite the inside of cheeks to stop myself from screaming.

  When they came back the next time, it was for our little girl. I thought I wouldn’t be able to stand it. We had to watch while those witches from the Department marched in, all smug, scooped her up and carried her away. I could have torn flesh from their backs. David had to keep a hand wrapped around the fabric on the back of my jacket, to keep me anchored me to the floor.

  I went home with David that night and I was on the couch, crying into his lap, when the telephone rang, and it was a woman whose voice I didn’t recognise. It was a gentle and pleasant voice. She told me she had Savannah in her care, and straightaway I knew it was true.
I asked her how on earth she had tracked us down, and she said, ‘Oh, all the information is always on the paperwork and I always call the mother. It seems so stupid not to.’

  I could have kissed her. Had she been in the room with me, and not on the telephone, I would have kissed her. I said, ‘Oh, thank you so much, it means the world to me that you have called.’ I said, ‘How is she? Is she alright?’ And then I had to say; ‘I’ve got to tell you, I’m not the mother. My sister is the biological mother’ but she said, ‘Oh, I know very well the circumstances. You are the mother. Now, I want you to know that Savannah is beautiful, and she’s safe, so you dry your tears and go to bed and the week will go by in no time.’

  The week did not fly by. It was extremely difficult, that first week, to think of anything other than Savannah, knowing that she was sleeping elsewhere, and not really knowing where. Try to put yourself in that position. Every minute of every day, thinking: Where is she now? What is she doing? Is she hungry? How long does it take them to get to her when she cries? Do they change her often enough? Have they washed the jumpsuit I dressed her in? Is there anything left around her that still smells of me, still reminds her of me?

  Does she miss me? Does she even remember me?

  There were times when I sobbed so hard, and David held me so tightly, that I thought my ribs might break, or else his ribs would break, and I remember saying to him, ‘Hold me harder, tighter, hold me’ because that’s what I wanted. I wanted my ribs to crack, so my heart could explode.

  Donna-Faye hadn’t come home with us. We paid for her to stay in the hospital for five days, to recover from her operation. It seemed to me that she was happy there. I went to visit her every day. Each time – and this amused me – she would take the menu and order everything on it, saying she was ordering for me. She would order steak and salad and two desserts and champagne and cheese. Her tray would come and she would work her way through the food, methodically, deliberately, happily.