Scream, my friends don't call me
Friends, they don't scream
My friends don't call, my friends don't-
All that's sacred comes from youth
Dedications, naive and true
With no power, nothing to do
I still remember, why don't you, don't you?
This is not for you
This is not for you
This is not for you
Oh, never was for you...
- Pearl Jam, Not for you.
“Have you tried writing it
down? It might help”
“Writing
what down?”
“Everything”
“Why don’t
I write down everything? While I’m doing that, how about you paint a picture of
‘everything’?”
“It’s
not good, keeping these things inside you.”
“Sure, it’s
downright corrosive. People talk about scars – bullshit, I have scars, they don’t
hurt. Things change, people grow, scars heal but this thing – it doesn’t. It’s liquid
and lifeless, like acid, and it just eats away at new tissue regardless… it
doesn’t scar, it burns like it just happened, it hisses and lingers, it corrodes
your concentration… dissolves faith ”
…
“Can you tell me about it”
“About
what?”
“What you remember”
“Not enough.”
“and…”
“and what? I don’t remember
the day, the night. In fact I don’t remember much about the year…or the one
before that, or the one after”
“What do you remember”
“Feeling
bad - badly… I remember moments. They don’t fit together. I’m not sure they’re
all real.”
“Do you remember how you felt then
– what do you feel when you think about it now?”
“I feel wrong.
I felt desperate”
“Desperate for what?”
“No, desperate… not for a
‘thing’, I wasn’t reaching for some ‘thing’. Just desperate… sliding, falling, scratching,
clawing, finger nails in the dirt, tearing on stones, just trying to grasp anything.
Snatching at what you can. It feels like
reaching into the world’s jaws… then being thankful even when your fingers find
the teeth, clasping great fangs because for a moment, you’re not slipping away…”
“It sounds scary”
“Compared
to what?”
“Tell me about the rape”
“...”
“Who was there?”
“Ando… Andy, someone named
Mick. I only ever saw him once.”
“Tell
me about Ando”
Ando was a fat cunt… well, eventually he would get fat. Initially,
he was just a cunt.
Tall and athletic, with the broad shoulders of an adult. He
smelled like a football changing room – sweat, socks and menthol. Girls liked
him in spite of that questionable hygiene. Most people did.
At 17, Ando was 6-foot tall and about 90 kilos. He could run
faster than me, kick or receive a punt (without fixating on the rhyming
opportunity) - he was school captain, he always had a girlfriend, he said he’d
had sex, and he had a 100-watt grin permanently plastered on his woolly jaw.
Like I said, cunt.
He had fuck-all reason to be so self-assured, his family was
as dysfunctional as mine, maybe more so.
“How did you know him – and his
family?”
Ando’s brother, Rus, was at the Police Academy with my
brother.
While we were at school, our brothers were two of the
youngest police trainees in a generation - part of a bright blue wave of hope,
recruited following the Fitzgerald enquiry into police corruption which tore a
scab off the festering, pus ridden lesion that was policing in the Sunshine
State.
I wonder which fuckwit thought 6 months of uni, 6 months of physical
training, and a long hot soak in self-importance would turn a bunch of
average-achieving kids, into what was needed to correct a century of abuse of
power. Within a few years many of those bright-young-things would quit or be
discharged - burnt-out, abused, facing disciplinary hearings, or on serious
criminal charges considering - too late – what it was like to stand on the
wrong side of the bars. Those who remained, blue-stained, learned the updated
rules of the game from those of their mentors who had survived the
post-Fitsgerald years: don’t cause a fuss, and don’t get caught.
I might have been 14 or 15, when my brother told me to
introduce myself to Ando, the piglets having worked out their little brothers
would be at the same school.
“You don’t like police”
“I wanted
to be police, back then”
“…and now?”
“Now I don’t
like police”
"We can come back to them”
“If we
must”
“So, you and Ando met through
your brothers?”
Ando didn’t know me from shit before that, despite the fact
we’d inhabited the same institution for a couple of years. We went to different
primary schools. At high school, he was popular, I was not. One day, I said ‘Hi’,
then mentioned the police academy. At the time I still aspired to follow my
brother there, so did he. In retrospect, Ando would have made a great cop, for
all the wrong reasons.
So, we had a chat. I went back to his place after school one
day. Over the next few years, I’d spend a lot of time there. His place is where
it happened.
“What do you remember about the
house?”
“It was shithole… and a shelter.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I felt safe there-
comparatively. It means they were good to me. It means I wish I’d burned it
down.”
“’They were good to you? Who
are they?”
“Ando’s
family – they felt like mine for a while.”
“Can you tell me about the
first time you went to the house?”
“I can’t remember the year, I
was at Mercy – fuck – that sounds ridiculous. I mean, I was at Mercy College…”
When we got to Ando’s house that day after school, we
dropped our bikes and climbed the front stairs. The front door opened into the
living room. Straight ahead, toward the back of the house, in the kitchen,
stationed at the formica table was Ando’s mum, Margie.
Margie didn’t move much. I remember her in one cracked vinyl
seat that semi orbited the kitchen table, smoking menthols in a stream, and sipping
a glass tumbler of Moselle filled from a cask in the fridge. Later - when we
got old enough, she’d ask us occasionally to buy more smokes and wine – she
paid for it of course. I don’t know how she survived, where money came from,
but I reckon she was stretching the same two brass razzoos to house, clothe and
feed half a dozen people for about five years. I suppressed the desire to do
the dishes or vacuum when I visited – although the house wasn’t filthy, just…
lived in. I wish that I had done it more often. It would change nothing of
course.
Margie might have been between 50 and 60 when we met – she
looked older - but her habits, health and her brood made such longevity unlikely.
She’s dead now. By the time she went, I hadn’t talked to any of them for over
20 years.
Margie always made me feel like I was welcome. I think she
pitied me. Maybe she couldn’t imagine what would make a kid seek refuge at her
place. She was kind to me, praised me about unimportant stuff, like my manners.
I think she was happy to have someone visit who could hold a conversation, use
a knife and fork, and who didn’t judge her home and family… and I didn’t. I
could breathe there, and for a while I hid there. Ultimately, it was like seeking
sancturary in a gingerbread house in the forest.
“So that’s Ando’s mum. Who
else lived there?”
Ando was her youngest child – his moniker, his surname came from
Margie’s second husband, a bloke she’d met and married behind the bar of my
footy club. You could see the club from the house. She didn’t talk about him,
neither did Ando. I never learned much more about him - he poured me a beer or
two.
“Oh?
Where was he, when he poured you a beer?”
“The club? You could see it from
the house - less than a block away. I spent about as much time there as I did
at Ando’s”
Ando’s footy club was further away – opposite side of the
airport. His team was made up of private school kids I now saw daily, mine
consisted mostly of a public-school mob I’d been at primary with.
Me and Ando only ended up at the same school because by the
time I got to high school, my brother had already fucked up just enough to be
shifted from public to private school. As a result of those indiscretions, my education-train
got rerouted at age 12; to pass through Mercy College, and on to St Patrick’s–
a newly minted pair of co-educational Catholic facilities delivering grades
8-10 and 11-12 respectively. For decades previous, St Pat’s had been a boys
school, and Our Lady of Mercy, all girls. Thus, with coeducation, the schools
now ground together like pubescent pelvises at a blue-light disco, and I found
myself surrounded by the sons and daughters of the business and farm owners of
our fair city. I didn’t like the school or the kids or my place in it – but it’s like they say, if you’re standing in a
room full of people and it seems like everyone else is an arsehole - well, maybe it’s not them.
We knew, even if the adults didn’t, that there was a
paper-thin difference between schools anyway. The naughty, grey-uniformed,
public-school kids who were frequently and publicly accused of drug use, were usually
procuring them from the spoiled little shits at St Pat’s. We learned to look
past who got caught, for who didn’t.
“Let’s go back to the house.
Who else lived at the house?”
“Deane and ‘Neen. The others came and went. Andy came
later.”
There was a little kid in Ando’s house the first time I went
there - Deanie might have been 10 years old. One of the first clues about the
household’s - complexities - was Deanie’s surname was different to Ando’s. Even
as the youngest, Deanie’s name was the shared by Ando’s older siblings –
Janine, Steve, Rosco, Russell and Andy.
“How did Deanie fit in”
“’Fitting-in’ isn’t a term one
would bandy about regarding Deanie. Deanie fit-in like a square peg, on a lathe…
it seemed unlikely he’d make it through the world whole“
Deanie’s mum was dead. I didn’t know the full story yet.
He had been born prematurely and with a cleft palette. He underwent
what seemed like an endless series of facial surgeries and painful recoveries, interspersed
with periods of trying to catch up at school while being tormented by bullies –
somehow though, Deanie had inherited his families general sense of intelligence
and humour.
Deanie lisped or dribbled sometimes when he spoke, and I couldn’t
help spluttering like Sylvester the cat - I figured we weren’t far different.
His grandmother and his uncles and aunts loved him, involved
him and protected him as best they could. He was smart, and sensitive - different
to us.
Deanie’s Dad, Rosco wasn’t there often – he worked out of
town, sandblasting at the mines in the days before ‘fly-in fly-out’ was an
option. Sandblasting is also a fair euphemism for Rosco’s recreational
activities. I remember him coming home late one night when I was staying over. It
was late. Ando and I were watching telly in the living room. It might have been
New-Year’s eve, we were drunk, but that wasn’t special. Rosco hurtled his way
up the front steps, tumbled in the door and locked it behind him - then sat
quivering on the couch staring at the door and telling us not to unlock it. He
was being pursued, he said, by a demon. It didn’t take us long to work out he
was suffering a severe and apparently LSD induced paranoid hallucination.
Whenever I saw Rosco, he was high, or about to be. Erratic,
smiling like a lunatic with a laugh like a hyena, limping, lopsided from an
injury before my time - he was fucked-up. I saw him rarely, ‘the Sandblaster’ -
I imagine him blasting away his mind with every substance he could lay hands
on, the wrinkled surface of his brain eroded by powdered intoxicants, back to a
nutshell-smooth surface.
“Dean and ‘Neen, you said were
there…”
Janine was home too, that first time. She was 40-something,
built like a whippet sculpted from leather. Her grey-blonde hair was cut to a short-back
and sides. She kept goal in a soccer team - we went to watch her play once, she
was good, at representative level, conceding a few years but no goals to the younger
women around her. She was fit, she might have been gay – in retrospect she
ticks some stereotypes - but I was a
long way from recognising it. Janine was Margie’s right hand, and another
stable, if lonely, cornerstone of the house. I rarely saw her, but she was
there – a fixture as much as Margie at the formica table, or the vinyl chairs, or
the cigarette-singed carpet.
That first day, after
meeting Margie and Janine, Ando and I wandered back downstairs, opening the
front door to a long entry room, with a couch. The room ran straight under the
house to a back-door opposite the front one. In my memory, Ando seemed to have
the downstairs to himself – I can’t remember if one of his half-siblings shared
it.
To the right, there was a dark, dank bedroom, with a TV and
double bed – I envisage it now, unmade, rumpled sheets and a too-hot looking
doona without a cover. The drawn curtains didn’t move often. The covered windows
to the front yard, faced the airport runway just across the road. I stopped
hearing the planes sometime around then. I still can’t imagine the sound.
Out the back door, there was pool. When I first saw it, it
was kidney shaped, brown paver edged, blue-green vinyl, but clear and inviting.
Seasonally, it would change from crystalline, to iridescent green and swamp-like,
then back again, as it’s priority waned with the sun, and the money and time
for maintenance and chemicals.
Just inside the back door, left was a door to a bathroom. It
had a window into the backyard from the shower, allowing air to exchange. When
we walked through the bathroom, we found another larger rumpus room – curtains
across floor to ceiling ranch-sliding doors again blocked out the street, the
airport, the world. It’s a room I still see – I slept there many times… before
it happened.
“You seem to remember a lot.
How are you feeling”
“Black”
“Black? Like what”
“Like a
shadow. Like I’m spinning”
“What shape is the shadow?”
“Black.
Spinning. A disc… with teeth.”
“Teeth?”
Have you seen the blades in a sawmill? They’re huge and
round, wider than an adult arm span… thick, tempered metal. The teeth are spread
far apart, around the edge, they’re only sharpened on the tooth ends, on one
side, where it meets the wood. Beneath each tooth, there’s a cut-out, a gap.
The blades have to spin very fast to cut cleanly. The gaps below
and between the teeth allow space, for air and debris to move. Circular blades
don’t slice like a knife… as they spin, they disintegrate a strip of wood the same
width as the blade, just disappear it, dissolve it and blow it away as sawdust.
“So you’re spinning?”
“Slowly, I
don’t know, it could be backwards for all I know”
“What happens if a saw blade
spins slowly, or backwards - can it still cut?”
“Not really. It just tears at
the wood, crushing and splintering it. There’s a huge strain on the blade - pressure, heat, deformation - it destroys the
wood or the blade shatters – both probably.”
“Do you want to stop for a minute?”
“Spinning?”
“Talking”
“Not yet”
…
“How do you know it happened?”
“I don’t”
“So why do you think it
happened?”
“She came
to tell me”
I was at home; I think I was 18. Home by then was a little
brick flat, across from a service station and a block from the Supermarket. It
was a 15-minute walk to work, but I often drove - I needed that extra time… I
don’t know why. I was always tired.
I had moved out of Dad’s house sometime. The flat had been
my uncle’s. I think that was where She came to tell me – at least that’s where
I remember it. I don’t trust my memory anymore. I think She had visited me
there before.
I get confused about timelines and places now – I can’t
remember where I lived when. It must have been there – it wasn’t our family
home, that was long gone, or the share house, or the flat I rented further out,
later.
“You’d
moved out of home by then?”
I moved out not long after I left school. I had come to hate
being at the house I’d lived in as a kid. My family wasn’t there anymore,
another family was – and I wasn’t a part of it.
I left school, went to uni for a semester, got a job in the
first holiday break. As soon as I had a job and a paycheck, I was out. I sabotaged
that semester at the pub, often with Andy.
“Andy – not Ando? You said
Andy was there when it happened. He was your friend too?”
Andy came home when I was in grade 11, I would have been 16.
He was 23, and fresh from a 5-year stint in Maitland Prison - the oldest
functioning clink in the nation.
When he went in, Andy was 18 years-old, blonde haired,
ten-stone wringing wet, and entering a maximum-security prison reserved for
crimes of violence – bad things ensued. Sometime after that, Margie and family
must’ve moved to Queensland.
Andy wrote letters to his family, I saw one. It was gently
written, to his little brother, with little cartoon drawings – I remember a
kangaroo who went ‘hoppity-hop’. It didn’t describe the author’s dark existence,
instead it seemed lettered in light for the reader.
At some point, someone felt the need to tell me - I think it
was Ando.
Andy had had an argument with Deanie’s mum, and stabbed her.
Andy would tell me later that he didn’t mean to kill her. She had been pregnant
with Deanie when she died.
Anyway, when he got out Andy came to school – and to stay at
Margie’s, with Deanie, who’s mum he’d killed, and Ando and ‘Neen, and
occasionally Rosco, Deanie’s dad, would come home off his head on drugs. The
cop, Rus, didn’t come around much, and Steve, the second-eldest lived further
north, had a family. I met him just a couple of times.
“Sounds complicated.”
“Sounds fucking mental when
you say it like that– but it was just life. Complicated – sure, like that Avril
Lavigne song? Just five chords - it’s all about the sequence and the strum. Rearrange
the chords – fuck it, take two away, and voila, different song. What is it they
say - about three chords and the truth?
“The truth? Let’s go back to
where we were – where you were.”
I was in a flat. I moved out of home sometime after my Dad
remarried. She, had two daughters, maybe 5 and 7 or something like that – maybe
younger. I fucking hated her.
“Why?”
“To be
fair, I liked her at first. Then I disliked her, then I moved out”
“Why do you think you hated
her?”
“I hated her when she left Dad
later and took everything – well, what was left, which was five-eighths of
fuck-all… but that was later”
“You hated her because she
left.”
“Not at all. I was relieved
when she left. She would have had her reasons – everyone else seemed to have
had good reasons”
“What does hate feel like – to
you?”
“Like the prospect of violence
- unrealised. Spiny apathy… being forced to care about something that you don’t
give a shit about. Sometimes it’s just an
absence… sharpened to a point.”
Dad treated his second family differently to the way he’d
treated us. The discipline in the house was too different to my childhood, and
yet it was so close – same house, same dad, different rules. It sucked - I left.
He was already single when they met, having abused his first
marriage in every significant way until it ended. Jenny had had an affair, and left
her husband bringing her young girls.
After mum, before Jenny, Dad and I had lived together for a
couple of years. He nursed his alcoholism and depression badly. I stayed
because I was convinced he’d die if I didn’t. I think he almost did.
“What was it like, living with
him?”
“Like bad Never-land. No
Peter, no Wendy - just lost boys, a mad Captain… and a sea-full of ticking
crocodiles”
Left largely to my own devices, I started polishing my own sense
of martyrdom with dependencies.
At 15 I drank and smoked, cigarettes and pot, and made
friends with excellent people possessing low expectations and short
life-expectancies. Throughout the last 3 or 4 years of school, I haunted
beaches and parks, and school-yards after dark. We went to parties in houses
where parents were not. In between, I pretty much lived alone in the house- Dad
was out. I didn’t throw parties.
Mum stayed close, in town until I left school. I visited. I misunderstood
who was protecting whom and from what - I couldn’t tell you now if I tried. She
was like the personification of a safe-box in a movie, a secret cache with a new
identity and resources, in-case my secret mission ever went tits up. I can’t
imagine what it was like for her to watch me, it was beyond patience. I understand
better now how poorly I concealed my delinquency – but she never treated me as
though I’d let her down, or hurt her, or made her lonely. I did of course.
“How is your relationship with
her now?”
“She’s still my safety net –
which I guess means I’m still her circus act…”
I don’t know how old I was when I saw Dad kick my mother - she
ducked into punch and sank to the kitchen floor, and he just didn’t stop. My
brother was gone, so I must have been older than 13. I ran to get the
neighbours for help. The distinguishing feature of the incident was simply that
before then, we hadn’t involved the neighbours. Maybe they heard everything and,
like us, just wished they didn’t.
A few years later I told Dad to clean his own fucking pool
in a fit of hubris. I was punched in the face, and fell into the water – before
dragging myself out and throwing a few back. I lost the bout of course, but he
didn’t send me to hospital that time, which I took as a positive sign that our
combined judgement was improving. I think I fractured my hand – he had a head
like a fucking rock.
“Did you hate him?”
“Sometimes.
I pitied him. I didn’t understand... I understand better now.“
“Was
he a good father?”
“Compared to what – do you see
anyone else in this story with a father?”
Physical violence was not strange in our childhood. I don’t
know everything that my brother experienced – he had five years on me. We both
learned young that physical discipline was an effective behavioural correction
method - later we learned that it was generally frowned upon outside of our home.
For a silly decade or two, we nursed the belief it was cultural - violence was unexceptional
in the towns of our youth, and throughout our extended family - we might have
been wrong, but not statistically so.
My memory is pretty fucked on most fronts – it could be the
product of repeated concussions or decades of alcohol abuse - but I like to think it’s just a sensible
coping mechanism. There were good memories too. I think all of those
experiences made me a quick learner - considered, but unafraid of making inconsequential
mistakes - at least those without immediate physical consequences.
“Is that what the incident
was… a learning experience?”
“It was a fucking rape. And
no. I said I was unafraid of things that were inconsequential. That night
wasn’t a learning experience or a coming of age, it was a fucking assault, and
there were consequences.”
“Sorry… I guess I meant, what
do you think you learnt from it – what good can you take away from it?”
“Oh. Well- let’s see if I can
explain it simply – you may want to take notes in case you need to refer to
them later: You don’t need to stick your
kid’s hand on the stove to teach them it’s hot; You don’t need to punch someone
in the face to teach them to do their chores; and you most fucking certainly
don’t need to experience a rape to develop a detailed understanding of consent.
What did I learn from the night my friend was raped, you muppet? I learned that
once broken not everything can be fixed, I learned that no-where, I mean
fucking no-where is safe, I learned that people are weak and stupid and
endlessly disappointing - and I realised that I’m fucking one of them.”
“I’m sorry, you’re angry”
“Wow. Perceptive...”
“You were calm, when we began”
“I appeared
calm when we began”
“What
changed?”
“Just
your perception, Clever Clogs”
…
“How old were you when it happened?”
“It’s hard to say. 17 or 18, I
think. Mum and Dad split when I was about 15. My brother went to the academy when
I was about 13. I think that’s the timing - I
don’t know, it’s all fucked up.””
“You’re confused about time”
“I’m no
Stephen Hawking”
“What’s he got to do with it?”
“Nothing. Time exists
exclusive of him. He just thought about it and felt the need to write something
down. He attempted to explain the infinitely indescribable, in twelve chapters”
“Is that what this is?”
…
“Did you go to the police
about the rape?”
No. I don’t know why I didn’t – or at least I don’t know
what the fuck it would achieve.
If you could ask them, the fucking cops, they would say we
were ‘well known to police’ by then. I went to court several times between ages
15 and 18 – family in the dock, villagers in the jury. I had been interviewed
by police. I was once interviewed for stealing a bike which had literally been fucking given to me by cops. I had been coached by cops, my Dad’s rugby
club was effectively composed of cops, my brother actually was a fucking cop –
for a little while at least.
As I grew up some people just changed from being people to
being cops, from people I trusted to people I did not. We worked with cops, ate
with cops, drank with cops, got fucked-up with cops, got fucked-over by cops, got arrested by cops… there are smallgoods
butcheries that see fewer pigs come and go.
“You don’t trust cops”
“I don’t
trust fucking anyone”
“You sound like you hate cops”
“Everyone hates cops. Fucking
cops hate cops.
You ever wonder why retired
cops show up on those investigative cold case shows recounting what a fuck up
the original investigation was? How they savour sifting through the tailings,
the grimy details, to justify how much better they are at interpreting acts
they profess not to understand, criminal acts they describe with words like
‘evil’, and ‘inhuman’ – despite their overwhelming, career long, day-to-day, in
between breakfast-smoko-lunch-and-dinner exposure to how fucking regular and
normal and completely fucking human, crimes of inexplicable depravity are…
Put it this way: if you find a
person in a police uniform who seems well adjusted and to be coping very well
….despite being neck deep in the shit-fight of degeneracy; despite their
coppish inability to ever assess the common societal ignorance and selfishness
that nurtures criminality; despite being weaponised, under-resourced,
undertrained, and generally despised by the people they are charged with
‘policing’ – if you find a person like that and if that person is not deeply disturbed,
not questioning themselves, their beliefs, their society - then that person is
a narcissist and a fucking psychopath, and they were absolutely made for the
job.”
“You think cops are
psychopaths?”
“I think
they’re institutionalised – for many, it’s just the wrong institution”
You know what – fuck it – lets draw a time-line in the sand…
mum got away when I was 15, around the time of the big court-case, and I moved
out about 17, making it the first half of 1995 when bad-shit happened.
It’s not like you can Google this shit. I tried. I put the
names of the dead into the search-engine just to stake a peg in time - it just
comes back with “It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search”.
I agree, there are absolutely no ‘great matches’ for my search, they’re all fucking
terrible.
At 18, I was a uni dropout, living in a flat I shared
briefly with my Uncle, before he left and I took over the rent.
“What was he like, your uncle?”
“Predictable”
“In what way?”
“Who cares?
Predictable was a pleasant change”
He joined the army straight after school, and left in middle
age. After his discharge, he brought his family to Australia, following my
Dad’s, perceived success. A few years later, he’d also followed him through a
divorce and into independence. Uncle was living alone and able to offer shelter
from the storm when I dropped out of uni, and began working.
Even by then, the former drill sergeant was not well
adjusted to life out of uniform. Not being able to shout at, swipe at, or shoot
people, left him with few options for managing conflict in the civilian world. He
was funny, generous and philosophical - but with the conviction of hard experience,
black and white with limited concession to shades of grey, which made him about as dangerous as a faded pedestrian
crossing. We spent my paychecks at the pub and called it rent.
I came home once to find he had written a note on the fridge
which simply said ‘not good enough’. I
didn’t know what it meant, but I got the message, I cleaned the house from top
to bottom, anxious of the consequences. When he arrived home days later,
nothing was said.
“We may have strayed a little
from the topic.”
“The rape”
“Yes”
“Do you
think I’m stalling”
“Are you?”
“Its 2024, and we’re talking
about events which occurred in 1995 – whatever the fuck this moment is, stalling
is not it”
“She
came to the flat…”
She came to the flat to tell me.
I was getting ready to go to play football, against Ando’s
team. It had been a few days since the night we stayed at his place.
I knew something was wrong, I didn’t know what. We didn’t
have phones then, to text and communicate every 5 minutes - kids today act like
validation has nutritional value. She lived at home with her mum. She was still
at school. I don’t think we had really talked since the night.
I remember the car ride the morning after the night. Ando
had driven us to where we were going – her to school. I don’t remember where I
was going. She was sick, I thought it was a hangover. She wasn’t very
talkative, I thought she was upset at me for being drunk and for putting my
hands on her. I felt like shit.
Ando seemed fine, cheerful even. Cunt.
When she came to see me, it was a Saturday. She said she had
been raped, I don’t remember what else.
I didn’t understand. I had been there: We drank all day, we
didn’t take drugs. We swam in the pool. People came and went, I can’t remember
who. We made out, I was lustful, clumsy. We didn’t have sex, we were virgins. We
slept in the same bed.
She said she had screamed my name in the night and I didn’t
wake up. She cried for help. I didn’t move. I lay and breathed. She cried, I
slept. In the same bed.
I didn’t know a fucking thing. No memory. Zip.
Black. Spinning.
I asked who did it.
She said it was Ando. She said the school captain, the 6-foot,
smiling, wooly-jawed football star, had raped her. She was sure.
“What did you do?”
“I went to
see him”
“To
talk to him?
“To
ask him”
“What did you say to her”
“I don’t
remember”
“Did you contact anyone else”
“I don’t
remember”
“Why don’t you remember, do
you think?”
“…”
“Are you ok”
“No”
“Do you want to stop”
“Stop what?
I hit ‘pause’ thirty fucking years ago”
“What do you want to do?”
“I want to
fucking kill somebody”
“You believed her? But you
didn’t go to the police?”
“I didn’t
know what to believe. So, I went to Ando”
“Where was he?”
“At his girlfriends… fuck, I
just remembered that. She and her sister had this house. Ando was there”
Ando said he didn’t do it. I asked him, face to face, on the
lawn. Just us.
Then, I spoke to Andy, his brother, my friend. I said what
she had told me. Andy who had been in the clink for 5 years for killing his sister-in-law.
Andy who had undoubtedly had a closer experience of intimate violence than I
had ever had. Andy who had drunk with me, lost fights with me, been fucked up
blind with me, and who had threatened me, tenderly, on occasion. Andy who was
trying to pull his shit together. Andy who would soon be married, and who would
then have a family.
Andy spoke to Ando. They said it didn’t happen.
“What then”
“Clearly, I didn’t know what
the fuck then.”
“What now, then?”
“Now I wish
I’d done something… more”
“You think that it’s your
fault she was raped”
“So do you”
“How do you know that?”
“Because
you didn’t ask – ‘why do you think that it’s your fault?’ ”
…
“How did you come to know
her?”
“I didn’t, not really. We
didn’t know each other, we just wanted to. It never happened.”
“How did you end up there,
together, then?”
Her mother had had what people now generalise as ‘mental health’
problems. A doctor would have called it something. Her mind was sometimes beyond
her own ability to control.
Her mother and mine were friends. They’d met in hospital, I
might have been 11 or 12 years old. I wonder now if they discussed the relationships
they survived.
Her mother died while I was out of contact., a few years
after that night. I don’t remember where I was or why I wasn’t able to be
reached. At the time I lived in a flat where there were syringes on the kitchen
table - not mine - but an adequate indicator of my reliability at the time. I
wonder if she knew what had happened to her daughter, when she died, if she
knew she had been assaulted and that it was my fault.
When I came home, I received Her phone messages. She had
tried to reach me, but I missed the funeral. I missed another chance of being… anything
useful.
“Her mother’s death seems
important to you?”
“Death is
important to me”
“Why?”
“In what
context is death unimportant to you?”
I think I went to the funerals of four friends in my last year
of school – double that body count if you include a couple of years before and
after. They linger in those years, in Neverland, like lost-boys.
“How do you think those deaths,
of your friends, affected you”
“Less than it
affected them.”
“Could it have been traumatic?”
“Life is traumatic, accidents are
traumatic, injuries are traumatic, loss is traumatic... but standing still and
remembering how someone made you feel, and hoping that feeling remains
somewhere, anywhere, is not a trauma to me.”
“Was the rape traumatic”
“Are you
fucking mental?”
…
“Let’s try something else. How
long were you together, before it happened?”
“Not long.
Moments over days.”
We were two years apart, and when our mothers got together we
hung out, as kids. She was shy, bright, intelligent and devoted to her mother
and younger brother. I felt older, more
mature. I was wrong.
Later I would learn her mother had leaned too heavily on
her, undermined and eroded her confidence, was prone to unpredictable mood
swings. I hadn’t known. I didn’t know until long after it didn’t matter anymore.
The night it happened, at the house – any relationship we
had, just the two of us, died.
I don’t know how long it was before we spoke again, after the
day she came to tell me. Somehow, we talked a few times in the year before her
mother died. We had both moved to the city by then – grown-ups in our own minds,
damaged, but in adult forms. When she spoke to me again, I couldn’t believe it.
I wanted to make it better, but I couldn’t overcome the thrill of just
speaking. She invited me once or twice for drinks with her friends, whom I
liked - but they were not like me, younger, university students, bohemian and
confident. I only wanted to see her, I wanted to undo it. She, I think, wanted
her childhood friend. I was still incapable of that.
She had a boyfriend, whom I disliked. Later, they had a son.
“When is the last time you saw
her?”
“about
1995”
“I thought you said you saw one
another later?”
“ I did… we
met later, but it’s been a long time since we saw one another.”
…
“I want to understand what you
think happened: You went there together, then she said she was raped, but you
couldn’t help her.”
“No. You
don’t understand. I took Her there, She was raped, I didn’t help her.”
“You
went through a lot”
“THEY went through a lot, you
cloth-eared bint.
She went through a lot, her
mum went through a lot; my family went through a lot, Margie, her children and
grandchild, went through a lot - most of them kept going through a lot.
Every person I knew then went
through a lot… I don’t know how to describe how singularly fucking awful, and
wrong - and yet ridiculously fucking unexceptional this horrible fucking one
thing was - is.
It’s not anchored in that
time, that place, those people. I thought it was, but I was wrong… Time doesn’t
give a flying fuck, it didn’t even flicker, it just ordered up the next
sunrise.
They all went though a lot… I was just there.
I literally fucking slept through the worst of it.”
“You feel responsible for what
happened?”
“‘Responsible’ is inadequate –
‘responsible’ is what a teacher writes
on report cards when they mean capable of feeding the class fish. Responsible
people don’t exist in the set of circumstances we were in - responsible people
have better shit to do than get fucked up and hang around in dark places with
part-people, just because being unseen feels safer than the alternative.
Do I feel guilty, complicit, culpable?
Fuck yes, I feel like it’s my fault. I helped create that moment, I took her
into it, I was there with her, within it, and I have wished ever since that I
could unmake it and remake it... but it’s not a fucking bed or a birthday cake.
What you’re dancing around
isn’t ‘responsibility’ You want to know who to blame.”
“Who do you blame”
“For what - life? What would that change? Who would that help?”
