by Kim Hodges
*
Mr Richards was there for the first six months of the big ordeal but he moved back to Sydney at the end of my year eleven. He had lasted nearly two years in Coolah and so he had been offered an opportunity at a Sydney school with an excellent reputation. I was completely out of sorts and he was gone. Interestingly, I rarely thought about Mr Richards after he had left. I suppose that I was preoccupied with trying to get through each day, modifying my bad behaviour, ignoring my mother’s daily berating and condemnation of me, and keeping my head above water. Shortly afterward, my irrational and volatile behaviour at home had become too challenging for my mother. I was disrupting the family. She had decided that it was time to see Dr Desmond on her own. Without me being present, they both decided it was time for me to see a specialist. Two weeks later, my father took the day off work and drove me to Tamworth to see a psychiatrist. Dr Desmond had written a referral for my mother. I had apparently made her unwell too. In the car, I felt nervous. The psychiatrist might make a mistake and label me in the same way that my father’s relatives had been. I had been told that there were many crazy relatives on my father’s side; his mother and grandmother had been locked up in mental institutions. The psychiatrist was a short, balding man, whose glasses sat too far forward on his nose. He had an egg-shaped body, which was moulded into a white leather chair with a high back. All that I could see above it, as I entered, was his balding head. He went on to ask me about the problems in my life. I replied that I did not know what was wrong with me.
“The isolation and the difficult behaviour that you are experiencing are your own doing,” he informed me. “I asked your mother to write me a letter, in her absence.”
He proceeded to read the letter out loud. It outlined examples of my terrible behaviour and it caught me completely by surprise, so much so, that I couldn’t take it in. I sat there shocked. I felt my breathing becoming shallow. I concentrated on my breathing, and retaining good posture, so as not to bring any undue attention to myself. I watched his mouth shaping my mother’s words. I tried to refocus and listen. Sitting behind his enormous wooden desk, quite smugly it seemed to me, he then gave me a lecture. “You have isolated yourself from your family. It is similar to being on an island by yourself. You have to choose to join in with your family and be responsible for your own behaviour, or not. If you choose not to join in, then the problems will never go away. It will create even more problems for you,” he calmly stated.
I wanted the appointment to finish. I nodded to assure him that I had heard what he had said. I was silent unless directly questioned. I couldn’t find the words to describe what was happening to me. I also felt that his mind was made up—that he was on my mother and Dr Desmond’s side. He reiterated that I came from a loving, supportive family and that now it was up to me to change my behaviour. My father and I drove back home. The car radio filled the silent void between us.
That appointment had cost my parents a lot of time and money. My mother’s angry voice declared the visit, “A waste of money,” due to my behaviour not having improved in the days that followed. Her nasty tongue was unrelenting. For three afternoons, I kept silent rather than enter into a verbal war that was unwinnable. On day four I avoided her, and rode my bike up Mount Hope on my own. That’s when I pondered whether to turn the handle bars left or right.
I got through the Christmas holidays, burning off my excess energy with bike rides and long walks with Anthony. He had finished school and was going to help his father on their farm for a year, before going to university to study English and History. His mother had suddenly passed away a year earlier and he felt compelled to assist his father and four younger brothers. I found a new attitude towards school and declared myself partially responsible for my predicament. I started year twelve with a fresh outlook and I convinced myself that I had changed. I re-entered all of my classes, planning to make up for wasted time and to make the most of my final year of school.
*
As term one started, getting to sleep became increasingly difficult. This was a new change in my behaviour. I would get to sleep later and later at night, often in the early hours of the morning not long before the sun peeked into my room. Waking up in the morning and making it to school on time were challenging. In fact impossible, but I dragged my heavy body out of bed to face yet again each day. I hurried, to the best of my ability, to get ready, but oversleeping jeopardised my chances of making it to the car in time for a lift to school. My mother’s beeping of the horn became a regular thing: three warning beeps and then the sound of tyres spinning in the gravel just past our driveway.
“I’ll only beep three times and if you’re not in the car I’ll drive off,” she said.
Loose stones and dust were left behind as she drove off without me. Many times, I ran out of our home with my shoes and socks in my hands waving at her to wait, only to watch her drive off. I can only commend my mother for sticking to her word. There was no leeway given, or reneging, and she never looked in the rear vision mirror. Maybe she had looked, but had chosen to drive off anyway.
Wagging school was not an option. The alternative to school was six drab hours to fill in, with barely anything worth spending time on. Checking my attendance was easy for my mother, working there, plus I knew how rumours of my absenteeism could circulate in record time. When I lay in my bed at night and closed my eyes I simply could not sleep. That inability to get to sleep would consume me. So I started getting out of bed and sneaking out to walk swiftly around the town, three or four times, to burn off the energy. If car headlights approached, I would hide behind a bush, or a pole, to make sure that the news never got back to my parents. Still, the insomnia took a toll, robbing me of my usual appearance and thereby attracting my mother’s full attention in the mornings. My very tired eyes popped out of their sockets, my hair wasn’t brushed, and my school uniform was dishevelled.
“Look at your hair, what a bloody mess,” she might say. Or, with a sneer in her voice “You have black lines under your eyes—you need to pull yourself together.” I nodded and didn’t bother arguing. After calculating the mounting collateral damage to my relationship with my mother, it seemed easier to ride my bike to school and be reprimanded for being late than it was to hitch a lift with her and be on time.
“I am going to ride my bike today,” I would say, closing the car door. I was a wreck. I knew it. I just did not want to hear it.
*
Towards the end of term one, I was once more banned from some of my classes. I had been unable to put into practice my good intentions from the beginning of the year. My mind and body were somersaulting again. I felt distracted and agitated, isolated, trapped and alone. My fingers felt a couple of lumps on my back. Were they itchy bites? When did I get bitten? My mind backtracked to a few days ago. Rumbling with BJ in the yard? When our year twelve class had played a game of touch football recently it had quickly turned into tackle, and I was tackled to the ground, but that was too long ago. Anyway, I forgot about the lumps until a couple of days later I felt more of them on my back. I reached behind as far as my fingers could go, touching the edges of the bumps. This felt serious. I went into my mother’s room to get her small, oblong shaped mirror. I positioned the handle so that I could peer into the dressing table mirror behind me. In the centre of my back were several large lumps, in a line down my back. Surprised to see so many of them, I knew that I needed to tell my mother. The next evening after my nightly shower, I showed my mother the lumps. She took pleasure in diagnosing things herself, but this time she had no idea. We needed to visit Dr Desmond. I rolled my eyes in dread.
Later, my mind wandered as I sat in the waiting room. My name was yet to be called, so I passed the time by reliving the last visit to Dr Desmond when he had prescribed the contraceptive pill for me. I had wrapped up the packets in a singlet at the back of my drawer. I would remove a few pills every week or so, place them in a tissue and flush them down the toilet. I knew my mother would check up on me, which
she did, more than once, asking me to show her the pill strip. I psyched myself up to lie to Dr Desmond and my mother if I had to. Generally, I never told lies, but I had justified the pill lie to myself. In Dr Desmond’s office, my mother described the lumps on my back. He examined my back for less than a minute. “Shingles, it must be shingles,” he said. He lowered my shirt, wrote the script, and commended my mother for bringing me to the surgery. The ointment for shingles was only available on script, not over the counter. Liking the praise, she smiled at him as Dr Desmond wrote a quick sentence in my file. I noticed that he required a new page for my ever-expanding file. No other questions were asked and none of the conversation had included me. As we walked out of his office, Dr Desmond made time to comment to my mother about what a good table tennis player Stan was, buttering her up, so that Stan would be given a pass out to play. She smiled.
I was relieved it had been that simple. I would just have to apply the cream and the shingles would disappear. I was doubly relieved not to have been asked about the pill. He did not check my fast pulse. Reminding him about my pulse was not appealing to me; I didn’t want him to touch me, not even my hand. I disliked Dr Desmond and I didn’t trust him. He was always on my mother’s side. The cream for shingles had to be applied three times a day, morning, after school and bedtime. My mother applied it with determination. It hurt so I asked her to be gentle.
“I have to get it all over them, so just stay still,” she said harshly. I tensed up more; there was no tenderness in her touch.
*
As the weeks passed my mother was at breaking point; she was losing it. Her suspicions transformed into accusations, which she hurled at me full force—I would be caught, with nowhere to hide. She became suspicious of me all the time, especially about drugs.
“You must be on drugs, the way your eyes are so large and pop out!” she glared at me.
Yes, my bulging eyes were trying to get out of their sockets. “No, I’ve never even seen drugs in my life,” I replied.
“I don’t believe you,” she reponded.
There was also the sex suspicion. “You must be having sex with someone!” she blurted out at me. This was the only time I heard my mother say the sex word.
“No I’m not. Who would I sleep with in Coolah?” I would reply. My responses were ignored.
She also had pregnancy suspicions. “Maybe you’re pregnant!” she might yell at me. I would not respond. I knew you had to have sex to become pregnant. I knew that something was wrong inside me, but it was not these things.
“If you continue misbehaving I’ll tell your father when he arrives home and he might give you a good belting!” At this point I always walked away, outside of our home, up the road or around the block. I needed to give her distance and a cooling off period as I knew my father aways followed through with her disciplinary requests.
Late at night, self-doubt and questions infiltrated my mind as I searched for understanding. Maybe I had had sex? Does holding hands with a boy constitute sex? I had held hands. Had holding hands led to something that I couldn’t remember? My mind searched for an explanation. Nothing sexual had happened to me. I knew that if you were naked with a lad the sperm could leave his penis and creep inside a vagina. Our class had learnt this in sex education— but I hadn’t done any such thing. I had kissed a few boys, on the lips, and I had thought that it was overrated. I was sure, though, that these things could not make you pregnant. Some nights my mind was so out of control that I resorted to counting sheep. Always over one hundred sheep. Eventually I would fall asleep to wake exhausted to another forty hours crammed into the school day. Torturous and unbearable, I felt as if a weight was bearing down on my shoulders, my body sinking into the ground. I was lethargic and dopey in the mornings.
*
Four weeks before the illness peaked, at the beginning of term two, my mother had announced that she needed some respite from me. I willingly moved, to another family’s property, for two weeks. My father always supported her decisions. The Shivers family consisted of a mother who was a nursing aide at Coolah Hospital, a farmer husband and their two children. They housed and fed me. I was welcomed into their home to give my mother a break. I was spoken to nicely, smiled at, treated kindly and it all felt foreign. I caught the bus to school, helped out with the animals, washed up after dinner and played table tennis. I could catch up on my lost sleep on the bus. I enjoyed being cared for by Mrs Shivers. She tried twice to talk to me about my behaviour and I agreed to work on improving, for my mother’s sake. I could not express what was going on inside of me, so I was silent, like a clam, disguising my distress. I hoped that this break would fix everything and provide a new start. Things were too broken in our home. On my return, we had three calm days before we reverted back to normal. It felt like I hadn’t been away; I was back in my prison.
*
Two weeks before the big ordeal my mother told me that she was unable to cope with my behaviour. I was making her sick, so that she had to visit Dr Desmond. He had prescribed tablets called Valium to steady her nerves and help her to sleep. She usually prided herself on never taking tablets, but in this instance she felt it was necessary. I quickly located the stash of Valium—in our small orderly home it had been easy. They were in her bedroom, in her undies drawer. I opened the packet. It was full, each row of tiny pills complete. These pink pills were to help my mother manage me.
I snuck into her bedroom to look at the packet every day. Not one pill was ever missing. My mother continued to scream at me. She told me that she was taking the medication that Dr Desmond had prescribed for her. She yelled that I had made her sick. After two weeks of assessing the pills, I realised that she was lying. I felt so calm and in control as my suspicion was confirmed. I probably was making her sick, but maybe I was sick too. I was told I was destroying the family. I probably was, but I had no control over it. I was also told that I had jeopardised my education. I probably had, but I couldn’t sit still. I was unable to express anything, everything. I wanted to destroy myself and I felt that no-one ever cared about me.
chapter twenty-two
THE ORDEAL
One horrible night, on the 28th May 1983, I experienced a terrible ordeal. Anthony was there when it started and when it ended. Creepy Wayne was there for a part of it. The run-up to the ordeal had started months before. There was a long list of signs: my pulse doubled; the days became forty hours long; the sleepless nights began; my periods stopped; my eyes started bulging; I couldn’t stop fidgeting; I was banned from attending classes at school and my hands shook as I tried to steady them whilst holding them out flat in front of me.
That particular day, I felt very unwell in my mind and in my body. I felt desperate and at breaking point. I had run out of puff. Exhaustion set in. All week, my mother’s suspicions and accusations had been hurled like grenades at me. They hit me hard and I felt cornered— my shell no longer made of steel but eggshell. I had nowhere else to go. For over a year I had been living with these inexplicable symptoms. It had shattered my confidence and messed with my head. I searched daily for an explanation and a way to end it. I had not been able to find one. It felt like an eternity, a nightmare without end. I had expressed how unwell I was, but to no avail. It had won, beaten me; I gave up.
*
Once I surrendered everything began to make sense. Finally, I had clarity and I was thinking rationally. The daily conflict, suspicions, berating and judgements would stop. “Selfish, ungrateful bitch,” had rung in my ears for days, weeks and years. In my mother’s mind she had given me everything. My bad behaviour and lack of respect towards her were responsible. I was the guilty party, no trial required. My family would be healed, freed of me; it would stop me destroying the family. My brothers wouldn’t be exposed to such negativity. My mother’s life and my parents’ marriage would improve. I wasn’t concerned about my father and how he might feel as an innocent bystander. He had been too preoccupied with himself. He would back my mother’s actions wh
atever these were. It was the right and correct thing to do. I had no doubt. However, I wasn’t sure how long the course of action I had in mind would take, so I prepared myself. I packed my small backpack with a jumper, pyjamas, toothbrush, towel and a change of undies and socks. My family were out on that particular day, so I was able to prepare myself undisturbed.
It was like a young man receiving a calling from God to join the Ministry. Or like an athlete deciding to train for the Olympics. Or perhaps like a politician running for parliament, despite the impact on their private life. That moment of clarity, that decisive moment that I had found was an enlightening moment. My forthcoming actions were already verified, stamped, like a secret document or an amendment of a law in parliament. Signed, sealed, delivered; in my mind the ordeal had already occurred. I just had to act it out.
I walked into my mother’s bedroom, opened the drawer and put my hand on the small box of pills. I had done this many times before, but this was to be the last time. I noted the typing on the packet, prescribed for my mother by Dr Desmond. I had read it many times. This time, I suddenly felt so angry with the both of them. They had colluded and conspired together— made all of it up. That doctor who prescribed those tablets and my mother who pretended to take them. Well, it was done. Now all I had to do was enact the final scene. That was the easy part for me—no hesitation, like an athlete, a politician, a nun or a priest—I had found my calling. I walked into the kitchen with a strip of twelve pills; I popped half of them out into my hand, and washed them down with water. Then I emptied the second lot and just as swiftly washed them down too. Twelve little circles, so easy, and it was done. I now had to get to my hiding spot. My focus and mind was crystal clear: but Anthony niggled in my subconscious. I owed it to Anthony to say a quick goodbye. I put on my backpack and left.
