‘Coffee, please.’ Unfortunately there is only instant. However, none of the clients seem to mind. I get the impression they would prefer real coffee but feel unable to ask, as if already they are receiving far too much.
When I place it on the table Gloria leans forward and says, ‘I told her not to do it, you know. I knew he was no good, I felt it right from the start. Before the littlie had even turned one, he was abusing her.’ She sniffs and applies her tissues before settling back in the chair with her coffee. ‘Never surprised me to hear what he did. Just glad it wasn’t Nikki.’ She brings the cup to her lips then pauses. ‘Disgusting that he got parole so early. Just disgusting.’ She shakes her head before sipping.
Gloria is apparently unaware of the codes here. There are many rules and regulations, but the most important ones remain unwritten. And we do not need to articulate them, the clients and I. Of their situations, I do not enquire, and rarely do they offer. I am not a confidant, a therapist, a friend, an anything. I am here to unlock and lock doors, to tick off forms, to watch the clock, and everything I do reminds them of how they failed, even if they feel they are in the right – and they all do – and they resent me for that. The worst thing, I have learned, is that coming here means they have a witness to all that shame. The junkies, the serial offenders, the prostitutes who have had their kids taken by DOCS five, ten times – even Traynor Lewis in there right now, who has been on parole for six months – they might have robbed at gunpoint or killed rival gangsters or stolen from their best friends and family to feed a habit, but the one thing that eats at them is the loss of their children.
Forty minutes is a long time to sit by the brick wall of someone else’s resentment. I often find I need to spend that time in the kitchen, which is possibly why it is so very clean. Sometimes I go out the back door, though not far as I am required to stay on the premises at all times. Sometimes I wish I smoked as it would give some small shape to my moments out on the concrete slab, watching the washing line slowly circle in the breeze like a skeleton. Someone has placed an old biscuit tin filled with sand by the shed door. Half the butts do not make it that far.
‘Another fifteen minutes,’ I tell Gloria, taking her empty cup. ‘Would you like a second coffee?’
She shakes her head.
From the kitchen I hear her moving about, slapping a magazine down on the table, then she is coughing again before she comes to the doorway.
‘It’s a bloody joke. Do you know how long it takes to get here? Took me two trains, then that walk. With my knees.’
‘I know,’ I say, turning around from the sink. ‘But that’s the limit. Forty minutes each visit. There’s nothing I can do about it.’
She coughs again, not wanting to appear to be an advocate for more time. And then, as if it’s all my fault, while looking me in the eye, says, ‘Nobody gives a stuff about people like us. He –’ she jerks her head towards the middle room ‘– shouldn’t have the right to see the boy, after what he’s done.’
‘Well. The family court decided.’
‘As if Winston needs that.’ She goes back to the chair.
But I disagree. I have seen the boy’s face transformed when he walks back out from the middle room. At first, months ago, it was a sort of blank dull look, not the fearful, hunted one I expect his mother was hoping for. And now is it something much more. Not pleasure. I would not say that. But a look of calm satisfaction. His face says, I have been acknowledged here, by my father. For exactly forty minutes I have been the object of his attention. I have seen that look on other faces too, and I cannot deny it has its importance.
Besides, as Gloria mutters and squirms, making a big deal of repacking her handbag and putting on her jacket, I am here, this place exists, because both parents failed Winston, not just his father. I know that Nikki repeatedly ignored court orders for access, leaving Traynor Lewis waiting long afternoons every fortnight, in the McDonalds’ carparks, or at gates of playgrounds while she took the child to distant friends. Gloria would not know what I have in the file. While Traynor was in jail Nikki took Winston interstate, and then moved house three times before the court tracked her down again. That file tells me of the father’s dogged attempts to see the son who was just a baby when the mother first left. It describes his violence. It details the first AVO, when Winston was only two weeks. The second. Her application to have his name removed from the birth certificate. The ninth AVO, when from desperation she claimed he had picked her upside down and slammed her head into the ground, whereas the only injuries the police recorded were a bruise on her wrist, and grass stains on her white jeans. Which would suggest all the other AVOs are also lies, except I know they cannot be. There is a list of all the Christmas and birthday presents he sent, another of the cards and presents she posted back. Photos of the smashed window of his ute. Of her broken mobile phones, three. I have read all the stories, two narratives, two parts that are the same and yet separate, like a Siamese twin that hates itself as it draws life from a single pulsing heart.
This is why both parties resent me.
Gloria sniffs loudly as, exactly when the forty minutes are up, I go to unlock the door to the hallway. And when I unlock the door to the middle room I can hear her straining to listen, desperate for evidence this is all so damaging for her grandson. However, Winston is holding a hand out to his father. I know that there are also embraces, as I’ve seen the shadows of movement as Traynor Lewis draws back, stiff, the second I enter the room. But they have reached the handshake stage, that much is clear.
Winston, clever child, composes his face as he turns to his grandmother waiting at the hallway door. It is as innocent as a new penny.
At the back door, I am poised with my keys when Gloria turns around and says to me, ‘What kind of person does a job like this?’ though not quite loudly enough for Winston to hear.
Even though I know the rest of the cases for the day I go through the files one more time. I am lucky because there are fewer visits today. Some days, not many, the appointments come one after the other. At first the department scheduled them with no breaks, and I was running up and down the hall unlocking then locking doors endlessly, it seemed. I would make their teas and listen to the sobs and sometimes their abuse until, before half the day was done, I was exhausted. Now there are decent stretches of time, some of them all mine after I’ve tidied and checked off the files. I make my own tea and sit for a minute. What kind of a person does a job like this? No one has ever asked me that before, outright. A methodical one. Someone with time, and patience. I take out my purse and dig for the photo that I keep turned face down in the little clear window section. He would be fourteen now. I put it away as I hear the side gate rattle. It is nearly 10.45.
Chantal and her mother are both quiet. Megan Pavlich never speaks to me unless she has to, and I don’t think Chantal has ever glanced at me, let alone opened her mouth. She looks down at her ballet slipper shoes while holding my hand as I take her into the hall, then runs to her father when I unlock the door to the middle room and all I can see is his face, unexpectedly illuminated by the most generous set of teeth when he smiles. He picks her up as carefully as spun glass. I think her mother dresses her in those sorts of clothes deliberately. Nevertheless he holds her close, folding the ridiculous net fairy skirts against his black T-shirt, and I see him nudge her face with his mouth before I close the door.
Megan Pavlich gazes at me as if I have caused what she suspects is too much affection being demonstrated there in the room next to us. She would like it to be airless of all emotion, at least. Preferably intense with fear so that she could brandish the distress of her child in the department’s face and never have to deal with her ex-husband again, even through the medium of my presence. Only once, on the first visit, did she ask me how long she had to keep bringing Chantal here and was deeply unsatisfied when I indicated this would be up to her and Chantal’s father.
‘Call him a father?’ was all she said before turning her back
and grabbing a New Idea.
Chantal has uncooperatively refused to be upset by her visits, and indeed, in the six weeks she’s been coming, seems to arrive looking forward to them. When they leave – not a single word to me from Megan Pavlich – I hear her chattering about the next visit. She is holding a fluffy purple rabbit. All gifts are meant to be checked by me and recorded in the register, but when I return to the middle room to escort Ben Pavlich out the front door, the memory of his lit-up face stops me from mentioning it. He does not, of course, smile at me.
I keep my phone on discreet, letting any calls vibrate if I cannot answer them. Few call. Most of the department work is via email. Yesterday, before I returned from escorting a client out through the front room, I stayed and tidied up. A scrap of a foil pack, though not anything illicit, as far as I could tell. An empty plastic Coke bottle. The wisp of a cigarette pack string, from a client hastily setting to light up as soon as he was off the premises. When I got back to the kitchen my phone registered a missed call. Reed Macken. Detective Reed Macken. We have almost become friends. Now I look at the phone and consider it. There are ten minutes to the next client. In ten minutes what can Reed Macken say to me considering it’s been ten years? If it was urgent he would have rung again, and again, possibly even texted me. I turn the phone off. It will not be urgent. It cannot be. And the next client will require all my senses tuned.
Bathsheba – she has insisted on the one name as if it’s a formal title – saunters into the front room, several minutes late. But it never matters as her children and their father are always late too. Half the time Bathsheba does not arrive at all, but when she does it is with an intensity that seems to be intended to compensate.
‘Can’t wait to see my little darlings today,’ she says, her rasping voice loud, as if for an audience. But as soon as she’s inside the door she collapses into the lounge chair and draws her knees up, hugging them tight. Her arms are skinnier than ever, and it looks like she has two new tattoos on her upper arms, roses with thorns and hearts and chains, similar to all the rest. Or they could be peonies. She is trying, I can see how hard by the way she clamps her lips with her teeth.
‘Would you like a drink of water or something?’ I ask. She has come with nothing.
‘Coffee. Three sugars,’ she says before looking up at me. ‘Thanks.’
I make her coffee in a melamine mug, with hot, not boiling, water – we have been trained to take care, for any contingency – and am returning down the hall when the back door rattles. I see them of course, and they can’t see me. Two children, and the baby, held by her father, peering through the mesh with the midday light behind them blinding them into silhouettes.
‘G’day.’ Mick is probably the friendliest client I have. The children, one not much more than a toddler, Bradley, and the eldest, Dolly, who is six, dart into the back room while Mick dumps the baby onto the floor. She’s sitting up now, wobbling slightly from the waist and displaying a wet smile before plugging her mouth with a fist.
‘Gail here yet?’ he says, fishing in his bag.
‘It’s still Bathsheba,’ I say.
He rolls his eyes. ‘Whatever. Here you go, Princess.’ He takes the fist from Rebecca’s mouth and gives her the bottle instead. ‘I should change her. What’s she like today?’ he indicates the front of the house.
‘Bad, I think. Better do it later.’ Bradley and Dolly hold hands and walk before me while I carry Rebecca, who does smell of wet nappy, though it is not an unpleasant smell, up the hall. Bathsheba is pacing the middle room when I unlock the door and it reeks of cigarettes, though I cannot see how she could possibly have been smoking. For this visit, I am required to wait outside the door the whole time. And Mick stands just outside the house, on the back slab, smoking and running his hands over his stubbly head.
As I expect, the visit doesn’t run to forty minutes. I try not to listen but I hear Bathsheba’s voice barking through a volley of topics. How’s kindy. Didjya see Gran’ma. Bradley’s three nearly! No way. Cute T-shirt. I forgot your lollies. Do ya like my rose. How’s kindy. Oh yeah I said that. Soon she calls out, then knocks on the door and when I open it I see how much she is shaking. She gathers the older two in her skinny arms and kisses their heads then picks up the baby, by now sodden, and hands her to me. Rebecca starts to wail. Bathsheba practically runs to the front door, and I have to give Rebecca to Dolly and leave them in the hall to let her out.
She is like a sudden wind that rises and drops so fast there is only a flurry of dead leaves to show it existed. The children look so deflated as I lead them into the back room, I fetch some Poppers from the kitchen. There are also lollies for situations like this. Mick looks on as I offer the two older ones the bag of jelly snakes. I join him at the back door while Dolly and Bradley select their favourite colours.
‘They’re not even all mine, you know.’
‘I know.’ It’s in the file of course. Three biological fathers, the last, Rebecca’s, apparently a client.
He wipes his hand over his face, then tucks his cigarettes back into his shirt pocket.
After they leave it’s as if they have taken the last of the oxygen with them. I am exhausted but there are two more appointments later in the afternoon. I spend my time writing up the notes of Bathsheba’s visit, as her parole officer will be wanting them soon, and the department case worker. Bathsheba has left her children in parks, shopping centres and cars, and once on the doorstep of a neighbour. She has gone to Mick’s place, off her face, in the middle of the night and begged and demanded and threatened to see them, several times. She has forged notes of authority to take Dolly home from school. Once she was apprehended at Central Station trying to take them north on the train. This was before the last baby. And when Rebecca was born, premature, addicted, she left the hospital and disappeared for six weeks. Mick went to the hospital and held the baby through all the anguished days of her withdrawal. I know she still has trouble feeding and sleeping.
The final client has one child. Maria Bruner almost creeps through the back door and I cannot blame her. Her son’s father disturbs even me. What he and Nicholas, who is five, say to each other I have no idea. Nicholas Bruner senior slides into the front room more like it is an appointment with his security manager than a meeting with his son. He is a thin tight streak of pure menace in a silver-grey suit. He drives a black Lexus which he parks right at the door. Someone is always waiting in the car but the tinted windows give no clue as to who. Maria has large brown eyes and ash-blonde hair. She is like a gazelle. It seems that Nicholas senior treated her like prey too. But his legal connections, which he exploited to try to retain custody of the boy, after trying to relieve her of the family home and all her possessions, have all recently vanished in the light of certain investigations, pending prosecutions. The court for once has seen the side of justice and Nicholas Bruner senior is permitted to see his boy only once a month.
Maria regards me as something of a saint. The first visit, she sat stiffly in her chair, facing the door through which her son went.
‘He will be fine,’ I reassured her again and again. ‘Nothing can happen here. It’s a safe place for children.’
She relaxed when I brought her a cup of tea, though did not drink it. It was clearly the longest forty minutes of her life and when I unlocked the hall door again and brought Nicholas through, it was as if I had delivered him from the brink of hell.
Today she has brought me a soap in a box wrapped in white tissue paper and bound in gold string. I can smell its fragrance, damask rose, through the wrapping.
‘You shouldn’t bring me gifts.’ It is not very gracious, I know. I lift the box to my nose. ‘It smells beautiful. Thank you.’ Last time she brought me a Terry’s Chocolate Orange.
When she leaves, one arm tight around her son’s shoulders, she looks almost content.
The last thing I do for the day is return to the middle room. There is so little evidence of the children and their parents who have been
in here all day. A lid of Play-Doh lies on the floor. Two sheets of drawing paper have been used. I tidy the pencils and crayons, wipe the table clean. The fishing game, the jigsaw puzzles, Happy Families can stay out until next time. Everything is locked and tidied. I take the laptop from the kitchen and switch my phone back to general. I will return Reed Macken’s call later, maybe tonight. There is nothing he could possibly be wanting to tell me, nothing that I haven’t already known since my boy was taken by his own father, to god knows where.
Out the back, as usual, Mick’s butts litter the concrete slab. I put my bag down and sweep them up with the broom from the shed, ducking the washing line as it circles in the breeze. As I unlock the car door, for some reason Gloria’s question is still circling in my head and it is not really clear why this bothers me because I know the answer, I have known it for years: the sort of person who does this job is one who has time, endless time, in which to hope.
Letter to George Clooney
Dear George
I was in the supermarket when I decided I had to write. Checkout six, one of only two open. Apart from the express lane of course, but then I had more than twelve items. Checkout six features a stand of magazines so that people can read something while they wait. Or the covers of something. I myself don’t pick up the copies of Who Weekly or Woman’s Day, though not out of a sense of superiority (because I do have that sense, believe me), but usually because I am overloaded and juggling the bags and baskets and the purse, the phone and the extra large pack of toilet tissue or the three for the price of two tinned tomatoes because I can’t help buying in bulk. So I just look at the covers, which lately always feature fat celebrities in bikinis or thin celebrities in bikinis. The thin ones are accused of being too thin and the fat ones . . . Well, you get the idea.
Letter to George Clooney Page 18
