He isn’t the one who hasn’t slept through the night in two years because of pregnancy and nursing; it’s not his hands that are cracked and bleeding from soaking dirty nappies in bleach and, unlike Linda, he goes to work, where he can finish a cup of hot tea. But still: Peter is, truly, not coping. He is constantly stoned. He cannot take a full breath. His eyes feel like dirty windows, he is so anxious that it is difficult to look outward. But, like his courtship and his marriage and his house and his kids and his shitty jobs, this unhappiness and increasing alienation from his wife appear to follow the script of normal life: the centre holds.
When Linda takes the children out, though, a peace suffuses their small house that has less to do with the absence of noise than with the space the silence clears for smaller sounds: the voice, for instance, that he practises softly in the shower behind the veil of streaming water. Not only pitch, but inflection, words, gestures. Or the refrain thrumming along his veins that signifies his only certainty and which says: you don’t belong here.
Driving into the city, his mind wanders as the car is sucked down the dark roads and he forgets, for long stretches, that he is the one steering and accelerating. He speeds up despite his mounting conviction that he is about to be incinerated by something like lightning.
How Peter met Michael and how he found out about his first gay bar are two lost secrets of history. There is no community press, no community radio, no visible community at all. For the longest time he had no gay friends or acquaintances, it was just him and his good wife. Perhaps there was a stranger who approached after a meaningful look, maybe a friend of a friend. Rumours, jokes, a rough gem of information mined from the shit the guys at work give each other on their breaks.
Regardless of how he got the information, he is now in possession of an address and he is driving there. The Dover Hotel. The Dover Hotel. Folded inside him these last weeks, he now takes the name of his destination out and holds it open in his mind where it bestows upon his solitary and hesitant trip the legitimacy of purpose. No lightning smites him as he walks through the door of the pub and up a flight of stairs. There is just the smell of stale smoke and beer and, as if from far away, a barman asking whether it’s his first time here.
‘Yes,’ Peter replies.
‘Well, you’re welcome to stay, mate, but things don’t get going here till ten, ten-thirty,’ the man says, turning to the sink behind him. It is 6 p.m. Peter thanks him and goes back down the stairs and out to the street to find a coffee lounge, where he sits nursing a coffee and pretending to read old newspapers until closing. Then he walks around the neighbourhood in large circles until it is late enough to return to the pub. But even though he’s had a practice run now, taken these steps once before and knows where he’s going, he still doesn’t know where they lead or what to do once he gets there and sees, for the first time, two men together. The uncertainty plays across his face like the movie of his life for those who watch him as he hesitates at the top of the stairs. His heart gallops in his ears and voices churn around him. The carpet is soft under his feet, and the men move over it, too slowly it seems, walking from table to bar or standing in small groups or pairs. He wonders if he is dreaming and then warm voices say something kind to him and relief floods through him and he can finally take a full breath.
He walks into his new job as tall and as bright as the white letters across the roof of the five-storey brick factory that spell out DARLING. Peter takes great pride in his duties as a laboratory technician at the John Darling Flour Mill, which consist largely of examining the various properties of the flour as it is made into bread in the test kitchen. He checks how it rises, analyses the moisture levels and adjusts the colour so that it can be sold to clients like McDonald’s and turned into idealised hamburger buns. He arrives on time each morning no matter how little he slept the night before.
It is early 1975. He’s a regular at the Dover now and the more people he meets, the more he learns about other places to go. These nights out are not about sex but about socialising and relaxing and exploring a world he never knew existed and, there, himself. Now when he walks past the bins of soaking nappies and in through the door each evening his guts don’t knot in dread because he isn’t really there. When he steps around the food flung on the floor or smells the milk turning in bottles in the sink, or when cries momentarily shatter his sleep like a glass flung against a wall, he doesn’t really notice because in his mind he is dancing at Annabel’s with Joe.
Joe, part Persian, part Italian, he finds quite gorgeous. But Joe takes longer getting ready in the bathroom than he does, which is saying something now that Peter wears a little make-up. It’s not really his cup of tea, this thing he has with Joe. But it feels more right than when Linda inquiringly rubs his back at night and, well, you do some things for companionship. Peter still wears his wedding ring but the radiant pride is gone from it now; that tiny manacle.
The pride is gone, too, from the house and the job and the kids, from the exposed brick arch and the funny old doorbell. It’s harder again to take a full breath these days. It’s harder to think and yet it seems like that’s all he does, chase his thoughts around in circles, trapped inside his head. He gives up on the bathroom renovation he so enthusiastically started; the gouged socket where the bathtub used to be recriminating him every time he goes in there.
Peter is not interested in tits, so he’s barely thought about it. But to the extent that he has, he just assumed that the showgirls’ sizeable bosoms are part of their costumes: made of plastic and somehow connected up and into the thick, bedazzled chokers they wear around their necks when they dance up on stage. But then it dawns on him that some of the queens are actually living their lives as females, in real bodies that they weren’t born with. Soon after this he overhears someone at a bar one night talking about taking female hormones and going through The Change.
It feels like a light switching on.
Finding a doctor is not easy. But he finally ends up at a small office in Carlton not far from the Dover Hotel. In response to Peter’s request for hormones, the doctor explains that the thing he is asking about is a small part of a long process. He also explains that the hormones will be detrimental to Peter’s health; they will shorten his life expectancy.
‘Look, well, I could walk out of here after this and get hit by a truck and still not have done what I wanted to do,’ Peter says.
‘If you still feel the same way in a week’s time, come back,’ the doctor says.
Peter is back a week later, even more settled in his convictions; the doctor writes the prescription.
He gains so much weight that they tease him about it at work. They call him the Footballer, say he would make a good fullback, that he is built like a brick shithouse. He laughs along and says something about all the beer he’s drinking, getting away from the missus down at the pub. Still. He grows his hair longer. Breasts bud beneath the collar of his shirt. At first, he is ‘gigged silly by everyone’ but then something changes. The odder he looks, the more protective they become of him. Even the rough guys who work out in the silo act kindly towards him. Maybe they admire his bravery, or feel sorry for him. Maybe they are simply making him feel as comfortable as he has always made them feel.
Each morning he takes out the stash he’s hidden from Linda and dabs chalky powder from the plastic compact across his nose before applying a thin layer of creamy black mascara, his mouth held in a perfect O in the rear-view mirror. He thinks no one can tell, but they can tell. What he doesn’t realise is that they no longer care. He is an excellent employee—eff icient, independent, a gifted conciliator—and he not only gets along with everyone in the office and the lab, he has effortlessly endeared himself to his colleagues. He has impressed his managers, who have been paying to put him through a management course in the city. The boss tries to promote him to a role that would require increased client contact. Though his colleagues are quite accepting of him, Peter feels both acutely self-conscious and mil
itantly committed to his make-up and his hormones. It is his strong conviction that he cannot continue to do what he needs to do and still bring the requisite dignity to the role he entered as a straight man. Despite the protests of his boss, and knowing that he is turning down a good career, Peter refuses the promotion.
He tries to get home after work to put in an appearance at dinner and occasionally he goes along to his in-laws’ place for a family birthday, but for the most part now he acts as though he does not have a family. He goes out late at night without explanation. He is always high. He drops the names of places and people Linda has never heard of before. He vanishes on the weekends to go shopping with his club friends for cheap make-up and new clothes. He buys a blonde wig from a shop in the city and, though in retrospect he will describe it as a hideous plastic helmet, at the time he feels ‘fucking gorgeous’ wearing it into Annabel’s and out on the dance floor. He is leonine, solar, ecstatic in those too-short hours before he has to hide it away in the backyard shed, to glow golden in the dark until next time.
Linda knows something is wrong. It tugs at the corners of her mouth as she tries, at the end of each long day with the babies, to conceal the sagging skin of her stomach under her one good blouse to look nice for her husband. One weekend her mother agrees to take the boys so the two of them can visit some friends, another married couple. Peter drunkenly proposes late Friday night that they swap partners. Linda reluctantly agrees because she thinks it will save their marriage. But after the weekend is over, after they’ve collected the boys and arrived back home, Peter announces that he doesn’t love her anymore and that he is leaving her for the other woman.
She is shattered. Peter prepares to leave their home, a process that takes months, during which they still share a bed. She is viscous with sorrow over the death of her marriage, tortured by thoughts of this other woman and what she will tell the boys and the sight of the moving boxes in the bedroom. One night in bed, half-asleep, her foot absently grazes his. ‘Don’t touch me,’ he snaps. ‘I don’t like women to touch me.’
Peter is upstairs at Annabel’s, looking down at the dance floor. People are drunk and loose on pills. Sitting on Joe’s lap, he feels good, anonymous, energised. They are talking closely, flirting and laughing. Holding hands on the way to the crowded bar, picking their way back across the room between sips of Scotch and Coke.
This is when he bumps into someone and absently mutters, ‘’Scuse’, without turning his head. This is when Linda wedges herself in front of him, when he looks down at her small face and his own syllabus of errors.
He cannot explain to her that although he is at a gay club, holding hands with a man and wearing a wig and make-up, he is not homosexual. He can tell her only what he knows: that he is different. He doesn’t have a word for what he feels, he doesn’t know that such a word exists.
He also doesn’t know his wife: it is clear now that he has grossly underestimated her, not just how much she notices but how much she genuinely loves him. She begs him to stay. She begs him to get psychiatric help for ‘it’, which at that time included shock treatment. He doesn’t make his mistake of gross underestimation again. He really has to leave now. He begs Linda to let him take the boys. ‘You can have more kids,’ he pleads. Linda, incredulous, refuses.
‘I was in fantasy land,’ Sandra remembers. ‘It wouldn’t have worked because of what I had to do to survive. I had no confidence in myself, let alone bringing up a child, and what would it have done to a child in those days, to be brought up by this queer?’
Driving away from their house in his packed car, Peter is shaking under the staggering weight of everything he is leaving: his marriage, his children, his home, the majority of his possessions, and a letter for the lawyers which says: To whom it may concern, I—Peter Collins—admit to being homosexual and wish you to grant my wife a divorce on the grounds of sexual incompatibility.
He leaves Linda with two toddlers, a mortgage, no savings, no income, no car, no working bathroom and no way of contacting him. He leaves his need to please his parents; he leaves despite the fact that they will say they knew this would happen, despite the fact that it will provide conclusive proof of their longstanding conviction that he is unworthy of love. He leaves despite having no job and no home to go to. He leaves because, at nearly twenty-three, he is so old and so young. He leaves because of something that he still cannot name and because the only thing of which he is absolutely certain is that he isn’t meant to be there, on Benjamin Street in Sunshine with his wife and children. He has never felt so alone in his life. He is shaking with the sorrow and terror of it, this driving away from and towards himself.
For years Linda will dream about Peter coming back to her. For his part, Peter will remember that Linda had long hair and dressed ‘like a mod’ in miniskirts and white platform shoes; he will say that she was ‘quite a nice person, really’. But the other details of her personality, whether she had a good sense of humour, for instance, he will block out entirely. He will never really confront the exquisite hardship—financial, physical and emotional—that his leaving placed on Linda as sole parent of their children.
It is also true that he will be unable to celebrate Christmas for the next fifteen years; that the memory of Simon waving ‘Bye bye Dada’ at the front door will hurt his heart forever and that, despite knowing nothing at all about his sons for nearly forty years, when he turns sixty he will place a photo of those babies into a silver frame and carefully position it where he can see it each day upon waking.
Sandra remembers that she was barred not only from custody but also from access to her children because of her purported homosexuality: ‘I were told I couldn’t see them or they would catch what I had.’ This is how she understands what she remembers of the divorce, but the Family Law Act did not automatically disqualify a homosexual parent from custody or access. Decisions were made on a case-by-case basis according to the welfare of the child, having regard to the parenting ability of each parent and to contemporary social standards.
The latter certainly did not bode well for the homosexual parent, but it did not inevitably bar him or her from custody or access. Linda remembers that, at the custody hearing, Peter was granted open access to the boys on one condition: ‘He could come to the house any time he wanted to, but if he came in drag, he was not allowed to say who he was. It was too confusing.’ Peter never visited the boys and he never showed up for the divorce hearing. When their divorce was finalised on 22 August 1977, Peter Collins, also known as Stacey Phillips, was listed on the papers at address unknown.
Sandra understood the impossible outcome of that custody hearing to mean that she was exempt from the legal and moral requirements of spousal maintenance and child support, forever. She told me once, in the context of settling her will so that her estate goes to fund scholarships at one of the wealthiest universities in the country, ‘I just want it signed, sealed and delivered so that I know that my estate is going to be dealt with. Otherwise, it could go to my kids, it could go to my wife…’
•
When Linda remembers the end of her marriage, she is a little self-conscious but her tone is frank and never spiteful. Peter took the car ‘but I got stuck paying for it’, she tells me. ‘In them days, the pension, I remember it distinctly, it was ninety-six dollars. My house payment was thirty-two fifty a week. That left me thirty-one dollars a fortnight and all I could manage to do with that was pay some bills. I was getting food vouchers every week. When [the welfare workers] saw the boys with what they had on their feet, they said, “Are those all the shoes they’ve got?” I said yes. With holes in them and everything.’ Welfare would help at Christmas time, and so did Boys Town.
Peter still hadn’t finished renovating the house. ‘I was left without a bathroom. Nobody would help me do the bathroom. So, I had to bath the kids in the kitchen sink. I had to shower at the neighbours’. That was for three years I lived like that.
‘My family wouldn’t help until the hou
se was signed over to me. I had to try to find him. Pete used to tell me about these people that he met, the nightclubs he went to and that he knew the spin-off group Play Girls from Les Girls. [One day, Play Girls were] on New Faces on Channel Nine. I phoned Channel Nine up and said, “Can I get a phone number for that act? I want to book them.” ’
Linda took the phone number to the police and told them she was trying to track down her husband, who wasn’t paying child support. A detective matched the number to an address in the commission flats near the city. The woman who answered the door there told Linda where she could find Peter.
‘I turned up. I had the boys with me and I had my sister with me. There was a girl there that looked like a guy, Pete was dressed as a woman and Simon was just staring at him, confused. I didn’t tell Simon this person was his dad. I got him to sign the papers. I cried most of the way home.
‘I was suicidal. I was at a psychiatrist and he put me on medication. I was going to overdose. I was going to kill myself and the boys. And I thought, “What if I die and they don’t? Or what if they die and I survive?”
‘I never said anything to anybody. I never saw any of our friends after we split. No one knew what to say to me. I wasn’t close to my mother. But one morning at 8 a.m. she turned up at my doorstep. I said, “What are you doing here so early, Mum?” She said, “I just felt like you needed me.” She saved me.
‘I had to snap out of it. Over the years depression has come on and off. You survive for your kids.
‘I was angry for a long time. I thought, if my boys end up like him, I’m going to find him and I’m going to kill him; that was how I felt in them days, but I got over that. I have never, ever criticised Pete to the boys. He was a good bloke. I did love him and for a long time I hoped he would come back. The only thing he did wrong was marry me, knowing the way he was. He said he did it because he wanted to be normal. It’s honest. He wanted to be normal.’
The Trauma Cleaner Page 6
