Girl on the Edge

by Kim Hodges

  “Thank you” we both said. Anger replaced my nervousness as I left the post office.

  “That bastard, Mr Turner,” I said under my breath as walked down the steps.

  Mrs Turner served customers without acknowledging at all the fact that she often had a very black eye. She never tried to cover it up, refer to it in conversation, or make excuses. She served me in just the same way, with or without black eye: a hello, the transaction and a thank you. Maybe she had no choice—the job was so public there was no way to avoid or hide it. Mr Turner, with his smiling, friendly face, beard and piercing dark eyes said hello to everyone in the main street, including me. I always pretended that I had not heard him and walked on. How dare he say hello to me—that disgusting, untrustworthy and horrible man made me feel sick. Mr Turner’s thick body and very strong torso left a strong impression in my mind. In the middle of winter, he wore shorts, a T-shirt and a vest. Everyone else wore warm clothes—long trousers and jumpers. Mrs Turner was half the width of him; petite and fragile with a slender face.

  Winters were bitterly cold in Coolah. On many days in winter our taps would freeze over during the night. The next morning my mother would have to boil up the tank water, so that we could wash our faces before school. A morning shower was not an option on those days. White frosts rested on our lawn on many winter days, but never snow, not in the township. Snow appeared, on the surrounding hills, about four times in my ten years in Coolah. It was so exciting for the kids. We would all drive out to see and feel the snow. Maybe Mr Turner was indifferent toward the freezing conditions, as well as toward his wife.

  “Why doesn’t someone do something about Mr Turner?” I asked my mother one day.

  “It is none of our business. What goes on in their family is their own business,” my mother replied. Her townie friends nodded in agreement, while they sipped cups of tea. That didn’t make sense to me.

  “Why doesn’t Mr Turner belt up a man his own size?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Probably because he would be belted back,” she said.

  “Why don’t a group of blokes go around to his house and belt him up? Why not?” I asked.

  “Because the blokes would be charged with assault,” she said.

  “So, he can bash up his wife, but a man can’t bash him up. It doesn’t make sense to me,” I exclaimed.

  “She could leave him, if she really wanted to,” said a townie woman. I silently walked outside. Because they hadn’t been able to answer the first question, to my satisfaction, I wasn’t interested in anything else they had to say.

  A month later the postman had replaced Mrs Turner twice, so I asked my mother “Where’s the postie lady?” My mother informed me Mrs Turner had been beaten up so badly that she was admitted to hospital.

  “Why can’t someone do something?” I hissed in exasperation.

  “Apparently she doesn’t want to press charges against her husband,” my mother replied. “Therefore the police can’t do anything,” she said. “It’s none of our business.”

  I wanted to say, if it’s none of our business, then why are you and your townie women friends all talking about it? Why don’t you all invite Mrs Turner around for some afternoon tea? But I held my tongue. Fear must keep her with him, I decided. I felt privileged and safe in my family, as compared to the Turner family. Mrs and Mr Turner had three children, two girls, and one lad, who were all older than me. Every time I saw one of the Turner kids, their father’s appalling behaviour filled my mind. Apparently, the three children witnessed the beatings, yet he never laid a hand on any of them. Although in our family we were victims of harsh words and the occasional moderate spanking, probably no more than we deserved, it was nothing compared to having to watch your mother be thrown across a room, her arm breaking. My father never laid a finger on my mother. I wonder if he was terrified of her potential for retaliation. Her temper wasn’t hidden at all—or did he believe a man should never hit a woman? Mr Turner behaved in a smug way, as if he owned his wife and that meant he had the right to do what he liked to her. All the townie folks knew; all the townie school kids knew. It was accepted as a normal part of life—just the way it is—and it couldn’t be changed.

  My rage still simmers under the surface as I remember Mr Turner and Coolah’s tolerance of domestic violence. Maybe Mr Turner required a good belting from local blokes to blacken his eyes, make him bleed and why not break a bone along the way? Mr Turner dished this out for free; someone needed to give it back. But violence doesn’t fix violence. Maybe a stint in jail, to give him time to think about his wrongdoings, would fix him. Coolah was a closed community, with its own rules. But sadly, in this way, the microcosm of Coolah reflected the broader Australian society. Mr Turner, one bloke of thousands of blokes across Australia, was a perpetrator of domestic violence. I held the strong view back then, and I still do two decades later that domestic violence is everyone’s business. Otherwise the cycle will never be broken.

  chapter eighteen

  POVERTY, WEALTH AND DIFFERENCE

  I believed, as teenager, that I was better off than the girls with scraggly hair dangling in their faces and the knots in the back of their hair. My hair was brushed until every knot was untangled. It was held off my face with clips, or tied up with a ribbon. My navy-blue hair ribbon matched the grazier kids’ fashions, but my sack-like uniform gave me away as being a townie kid. My school shoes were perfectly polished. My father completed a shoe-shining ritual every Sunday afternoon. I was neater than many townie kids. My mother taught me that being neat, clean and tidy was to be valued highly. She always commented on scruffy, unkempt and dirty kids. This equated to poor parenting in her view. She directed scathing words towards mothers who she saw as having failed to meet their good parenting obligations—my mother never bit her tongue or held her words.

  I felt that I also must be better off than Dale and Annie, the children of Conny and Bert Hatfield. Another child of theirs, Josie, had passed away. Their house was close to the centre of town and was only just standing. The big yard was filled with cars and bike parts, tyres, tin, wood and old electrical goods covering the grass. Everyone imagined that the inside of the house was just as filthy. The four family members were dirty. We all assumed that weeks passed before the Hatfield family bathed. If I passed Conny or Bert on foot, I noticed the dirt caked so hard on their faces that a chisel might be required to get it off. I smelled Conny and Bert when I passed them in the street; body odour smell combined with dirt, urine and rarely washed clothes. You could smell Dale in the school playground. The family often dressed in ragged clothes. Our mother informed us that Bert wore potato sacks, or old pants held up with safety pins. The school office secretary located a uniform in Dale’s size from the second-hand school bin, and washed and ironed it, before the start of each school term. Dale’s thick-lensed, black-rimmed glasses never left his face, and they were held together with a bandaid wrapped around the middle part to strengthen the frame. He also wore a visible hearing aid attached to the top of his ear. Dale’s face was square, not round, like the faces of other kids his age. His straight black hair matched the rims of his glasses. His dark eyes stared straight through you, and he stood stiffly upright with a strong torso.

  Bert would sometimes pull a cart that Dale sat in, while they collected scraps and rubbish from around the town. The duo often went to the council tip to fossick. Hours later, they would return, with Dale proudly sitting up high in the cart, perched on top of their claims, inevitably destined to further reducing the visibility of the grass in their backyard. Conny sometimes wore a pair of pyjamas with bright, swirling patterns of pinks and blues on her main street outings. She was mad, but harmless, I was told. The Coolah gossip had informed me that the entire Hatfield family were “slow.” Apparently they all shared a mental disability, biologically based, according to my mother, but that did not add up for me. Annie was bright, switched on, and not like her three kin. At school, kids felt sorry for Annie for being in the Hatf
ield family. I noticed she was included in schoolyard groups, unlike Dale. Her sharp short haircut, and alert eyes, differentiated her from the rest of her family members. My mother encouraged us to say hello or wave, but not to stop and talk to them. Everyone else in the town adhered to this too. It was the done thing. If Bert was asked, “How are you?” he responded with a “G-g-g-good.” Bert sometimes attempted a whole sentence, which took forever to leave his mouth. His stutter choked every word that swam around his throat and tried to force its way out. Occasionally, teenagers on their bikes approached him and asked him a question that required more than a single word response—just to get him stuttering—and then rode away giggling at the severity of the stutter. My mother told us that we were never to do this—so we didn’t.

  Poor Josie was four years old when she wandered into a farmer’s dam and drowned. Conny and Bert were present, but not being attentive enough, apparently, and Josie had yet to learn to swim. I have no memory of that daughter. My mother attended the funeral. “That poor little girl who never really had a hope,” was my mother’s forthrightly shared view on the matter. That funeral had been my mother’s initiation into the local Anglican Church.

  “They bought the body back home in such a small box to bury her. All I remember is Bert sitting in the church, with his hands covering his face, sobbing and saying ‘Josie, my little Josie.’ A few of us attended the funeral and brought the morning tea,” she told me. My mother provided the same consistent response to my query in the years to follow. She was very generous with her time and donations of food to anyone with a disability or “slowness.” The Hatfield family brought out the best in my mother.

  The townie women had arrived at the church service with armfuls of home-baked goods. These women cooked prize-winning sponge cakes, scones and pikelets, all fluffy and light, filled or topped with fresh whipped cream and jam. For the two hours of the service and morning tea, compassion and sympathy flowed freely from the immaculately dressed townie women, to the Hatfield family in their time of greatest need. After the service, in the privacy of their homes, these women might tear shreds off anyone. Over cups of tea or coffee in person or in long phone calls, these women felt entitled to dissect each word spoken at the service, critique people’s attire, and interpret people’s body language in ways unimaginable. Not one of these women knocked on the Hatfield’s door in the coming weeks, nor called around with an extra meal, or phoned the Hatfield family. That was the role of the Anglican Minister. The local women justified any harsh words that came from their mouths because they were givers, they were the providers of the wonderful morning tea, and they had attended the Hatfield family service, unlike many other townies.

  Even now, I can clearly recall the faces of the Hatfield family members. Their blank expressions or their shrieks of joy as Bert and Dale discovered treasures at the tip. I can still hear their voices. The Hatfield family, except for the teasing teenagers, never attracted much direct animosity. They were not violated in anyway by the townies in Coolah. The Hatfield family were tolerated by the community, not included, but left to be. It was just the way it was.

  *

  I also felt comparatively blessed in comparison with two other families residing in Coolah. The Knox family rented a house on Binnia Street and the Simmons lived on the edge of town. Everyone called them the “Far West” families. That identified them; their first names, faces, personalities or interests faded into nothingness and insignificance. The Knox family were a single mother and her four kids. I saw the kids walking with one another to and from school and playing together within the school playground, but rarely with other kids. I was not in their classes at school. I often walked past the family house, on the long way home after school, and saw the kids playing in the front yard. I never saw the Knox kids at weekend sport, or at the local swimming pool.

  The Simmons parents had a tribe of very young kids: five, six, seven or eight children. No-one knew or cared. Every fortnight, their rust coloured station wagon cruised into Binnia Street for an essential grocery shop. The bare-footed kids with hair covering their faces would pour out of the car and the boot, as the father parked. An hour later the skinny pale-faced kids held bags of groceries in each hand and loaded these into the car. The smiling parents handed out ice creams from a box as their money had stretched to buying a special treat. They all ate their ice creams while standing around on the pavement then re-entered the car doors and boot. The kids competed for car-seat space all the way back out of town whilst balancing shopping bags on their laps and licking ice-cream drips off their faces.

  Both of these families had been sent to Royal Far West Children’s Services, via a referral system through the school or hospital. Located in Sydney, it was an institution for poor kids with health issues that required medical treatment. A two-week stint at Royal Far West Children’s Services provided kids with medical care, education, and a fun holiday by the sea, as well as parental respite. It was common knowledge that only the kids whose family had little spare money to cover ongoing medical expenses and no spare money for holidays were eligible.

  I knew the Knox kids by sight, as I passed them in the street, I acknowledged them with a nod, but I actually knew nothing about them. These kids were not dirty or dishevelled like some townie kids, but rather scruffy and unkempt and still different to us. I never passed Mrs Knox in the street or saw her out shopping for groceries after school hours. She sat on the front porch of their rented house watching her kids play. This was the only context in which I laid eyes on her. I could recognise her face, but knew nothing else about her. Although we were never told that our family was better than the Far West families, growing up it was a feeling that was somehow had conveyed to me. The townie families never mixed with the Far West families. These families kept to themselves, as much as one can in a small community.

  *

  After moving to Sydney, when I thought about growing up in Coolah and tried to recall the names of the people in these families, I could not, and nor could I visualise any of their faces. I have a good memory for obscure detail: people, places and events. I can’t remember these families. Was there no need to remember the Knox family? Why bother with the Simmons family? Maybe subconsciously I knew they were not worth remembering. Certainly, that label was endorsed by the entire town—and harmless on the surface. Yet it was another strict division that was observed in Coolah.

  *

  I felt both better off and worse off compared to the twins’ family. Better off as I compared our houses, car and homely possessions. But worse off as I compared my lack of self-confidence, unease, un-coolness and the inability to fit in with the confidence and sociability of the twins. They were a single parent family, made up of four girls and one boy. The mother left the father when the youngest twins were five years old and returned with her five children to her hometown, Coolah. They were allocated a Department of Housing house, a modest three-bedroom home, in Martin Street. The mother had her own room and the four girls shared a room, but the boy lucked out and was allocated his own sleep-out. After a few years on her own, their mother found some time to socialise and met another male partner. The partner moved in, and although he was never referred to as a father, he took on the fatherly role.

  Susie and Sam always seemed much happier than me and they cruised through life. They were happy and full of laughter and good times. A couple of times I convinced myself it was because they had groovy older siblings and a relaxed mother, whereas I was the eldest in our family with a controlling mother. After the big ordeal happened I never spoke to them about it. I went on through that final couple of months of school like nothing had really happened. It felt too personal, embarrassing and shameful. I also assumed my twin friends would not really want to know about it anyway. So I boxed it up, threw away the key and buried it forever. I clearly stated to my twin friends that I wanted to leave Coolah after school and travel overseas. They accepted this but did not express a similar desire. So there was a distanc
e already between us.

  Occasionally I visited the twins’ house in Martin Street. Inside there were five piles of folded washing waiting patiently to be put away, or clean clothes in washing baskets filled to the brim, expecting to be folded. The house was very small, the furniture modest and the walls bare of any pictures. There was a permanent pile of dishes on the sink waiting to be washed up, and the toaster always out on the bench. The four girls slept in a bedroom with two double bunk beds, a wardrobe and a chest of drawers.

  Once I visited their house directly after school, when their mum wasn’t at home. Sam offered me toast for afternoon tea, but the bread wouldn’t fit in the toaster. Something was wrong, so Sam turned off the electricity, pulled the cord out of the wall and turned the toaster upside down. So many crumbs fell out of the toaster. She shook it and looked up inside it. “Aaargh, there’s a mouse in there!!!” she bellowed. Still holding the toaster up, she said to me, “Look at it.” I could see the tail hanging out. I could feel my eyes popping out—I was shocked, but pretended not to be shocked. Sam smiled and put the toaster back on the bench.

  “Let’s go outside to play, Kim,” she said, unfazed by this encounter. We didn’t fuss any more about afternoon tea on that day.

  Wow, I was shocked because my mother methodically wiped down and shook the crumbs out every morning and put the toaster away. No crumbs in our home, let alone crumbs in the toaster for a mouse to seek out, I thought, as I compared the two families.

  Although our house was grander, neater and spotless compared to my twin friends there was another big difference that stood out. The oldest set of twins was four years older than me, and they were really popular and cool. For the younger set of twins who were my age, popularity was an entitlement, merely for being the sisters of the older set of twins. The friends of the eldest set of twins populated the Department of Housing front yard. It was host to touch footy games, soccer, tips, handball and general hanging out—which was seen by anyone driving by. The talking and laugher that filled the front yard reverberated out into the street.