I’m the reason my little sisters got taken away. I knew that Mum was drunk, and I knew that I should stay home and take care of them. But I was selfish, and I didn’t want to deal with Mum’s abuse anymore, so I left.
The police had taken them by the time I got back.
We lived in a very run-down little house in the Blue Mountains, on a street that was mostly bush. There was one house next to us, one across the street, and nothing else for a few hundred metres either side. It was the kind of place that would feature in a horror movie after the car takes a wrong turn and breaks down. This street definitely wasn’t from the ‘we’re still happy and nothing could ever possibly go wrong’ part of the movie. It was more from the ‘is it worth knocking on the door of that house for help when it’s fairly likely that the people who live inside collect the fingers of tourists’ part of the movie. It was an eerie, creepy, isolated street. But with a beautiful view!
The house belonged to Mum’s latest boyfriend, who she’d met while Rhiannon, Tayla and I were living in foster care. Brian, like all of Mum’s boyfriends before him, was convinced that he would be the one to save her; the one to stop her from drinking. Like he had some magic formula for sobriety that none of us had thought of yet. Even at ten years old, I would look at those guys and think, ‘Oh! You mean we just have to tell her that we don’t want her to drink anymore? That we didn’t really enjoy having our foster dad stick his hands down our pants and we would very much like to have a mother who doesn’t put us in that position again? That she just needs to be strong and choose Diet Coke instead? WHY DIDN’T WE FUCKING THINK OF THAT?’
When we first arrived at Brian’s house, there was a giant Confederate flag hanging on the main wall in the living room. ‘Oh good,’ I thought. ‘Mum’s choice in men continues to be top notch.’ (Seriously – if you were dating someone, got back to their place for the first time and saw that on the wall, how could you not immediately push life’s panic button and get the hell out of there?) But besides smoking pot twenty-four hours a day (which essentially turned the house into a giant Dutch oven – I’m sure I was permanently stoned from ages nine to fourteen), I thought he was a nice guy at the time. I didn’t know any better. Just another guy who got caught in my mother’s irresistible web, and planned to revolutionise the way alcoholism was treated – maybe even cure it! – through the power of love.
He did not cure alcoholism through the power of love. If he had, I would have been pissed off, to be honest, since Mum’s love for her daughters hadn’t cured anything. She would always love booze most of all (wine in a box was her favourite), and if she wouldn’t give it up for us, at least she wasn’t giving it up for someone else. That would have stung.
Brian did what he could though. He was the one who picked me up when I faked a broken ankle to get out of running cross-country. Granted, I faked the broken ankle because he had initially refused to pick me up and I wasn’t entirely sure how I was going to get home, so I figured an ambulance could get the job done. (I hadn’t anticipated the ambulance would take me to the hospital and not just conveniently drop me off at my front door after maybe stopping at Maccas on the way.)
It all started when I came third in my primary school cross-country. I can’t remember how long it was, I think only about three kilometres, but I was not even close to being an athletic person. Sports, and the obligation to compete in organised sporting activities, was abhorrent to me. As far as my PE teachers were concerned, I had permanently had my period from birth, and would therefore be unable to climb that rope/swing or bat/torture myself in your horrific ‘beep test’.
When I ended up in a private school in Year 10, where sport is considered more important than learning to read, my period excuse was often dismissed by the female teachers, who seemed to have this magical way of knowing that I could not possibly have blood gushing out of me twenty-nine days of every month. Aware that I needed to try a different tack, I started earnestly telling them that I couldn’t participate in PE because I had ‘a bone in my foot’. I would always say it quietly, like I found it humiliating; like I was sharing a shameful secret with them that only a select few knew. At first I just wanted to see if I could use a ridiculously idiotic excuse to successfully get out of physical activity. I never dreamed that anyone would take it seriously.
‘So, you have a . . . bone. In your foot?’
‘Yes,’ I would reply, looking sad, with my head down. ‘I do.’ Yet, while I was quietly thinking, ‘Who fucking doesn’t, you idiot?’ it appeared, in my efforts to be a smartarse, I had lucked onto a bizarre excuse that actually worked.
‘Oh, okay,’ the teacher in charge would reply, looking concerned. ‘You should probably sit this one out.’
I never had to do the beep test again.
But back in Year 6, at a tiny Blue Mountains public school, there was no getting out of cross-country. It was a class activity that everyone had to participate in, no matter how many periods I insisted I . . . had. (I didn’t exactly understand how periods worked at that stage.)
I suppose, given I was ten and sprightly and TV still only had five channels, I was accidentally fit. Because about two minutes into the three-kilometre race, I found myself coming first. It was a complete shock to me – I had not expected to make it once around the oval, and here I was, one lap in, in the lead, and not even tired. I started to fancy myself as some kind of superhuman. Clearly, I had an untapped skillset that could only be explained by my having been born an exceptionally gifted athlete, which I was only now just discovering. I would need to change my whole life plan. Writing for television was out. I needed to pivot my fantasies of winning an Emmy and an Oscar to winning Olympic Gold. I was built to have the wind flowing through my hair, I was meant to be a runner, I was meant to wear an ugly green and gold suit during the opening ceremony, I was meant to . . .
A significant number of people had somehow managed to get ahead of me. I was slowing down. It turns out running gets harder the farther you go. My chest hurt. My legs hurt. My knees hurt. Oh, that’s right. Running is the worst.
My ego had been stroked by the amount of people cheering me on though, so I decided, for the first time in my life, I would try at sport . . . stuff. I at least wanted to finish, and not finish last. I was in pain, wanted to throw up, and knew unequivocally that this was not something I would ever put myself through again. So I pushed on, knowing it would be the last time, and somehow ended up coming third. (Out of about eleven people, but still – to me it was the equivalent of winning Wimbledon. Or whatever the most famous running thing is. The Super Bowl?)
When you come third, you get a ribbon, which was the first time I’d ever won a prize for anything non-academic in my life. I decided it was the perfect time to retire a champion. Knowing it was the last time I would ever have to do it was the only thing that motivated me to get to the end. I was done.
Then I was informed that the top three runners were required to represent the school in the ‘regional’ cross-country, a race that included about two hundred of the fastest kids from the entire Blue Mountains region.
Well, shit.
There was a lot of chatter about how the other talented athletes and I would go at ‘regionals’. It sounded like it was going to be a high-pressure situation, which I had zero interest in. But it was imperative that we represent our primary school and represent it well – that’s why the runners with the most talent had been chosen. Only the ‘best of the best’ went to regionals, obviously. Oh, and another thing, regionals wasn’t three kilometres, it was five. But that’ll be easy for the best runners, right?
I had almost puked up a lung as I crossed that three-kilometre finish line. This was not going to end well.
The regionals were being held at my sister’s high school about half an hour away, so we could run the cross-country on a fancy running track because we were all very talented, fancy runners. I could get the bus in with Rhiannon, but I was going to need someone to come and pick me up, unless I wanted to wait four hours to get the high-school bus home. When I told Mum and Brian this, they responded just the way I had expected.
Mum was not exactly partial to the child pick-up. If we were old enough to read, we were old enough to get around without her having to sober up and drive somewhere to get us. It wasn’t unusual to wait over two hours for her to arrive somewhere, if she arrived at all. In the days before mobile phones, we would have to call the house via a payphone, which we never had money for, so we would use reverse charges, which Mum never accepted. The only way you could hope to get a message to her would be to try and scam the reverse charge system. Our calls all ended up sounding something like this:
Phone recording: ‘Hello. You have a caller requesting to speak to you via reverse charges. The caller’s name is:’
Me: ‘It’sRosieI’matthestationpleasescomeandgetme.’
Phone recording: ‘If you would like to accept this call, please press 1. If not, you may hang up.’
She would always hang up. She usually turned up eventually. Usually.
I thought this was mostly normal. It wasn’t until she made me go to a specialist doctor’s appointment by myself when I was eleven years old that I realised my wandering the streets alone seemed to bother other adults. I had been getting pretty bad back pain for a while, and the local GP had sent me to get X-rays, which showed possible scoliosis. The GP referred me to a specialist at Westmead Children’s Hospital, which was about an hour from where we lived in the Blue Mountains. I was pretty excited about this scoliosis thing, because I got to take the day off school and there was a KFC on the way back from Westmead, so I thought everything was coming up Rosie. The day came, however, and Mum didn’t want to get out of bed.
‘It’s easy,’ she said. ‘Just catch the train. And there’ll be maps at Westmead station directing you to the hospital. That whole bloody suburb is just the hospital. You can’t miss it.’
I had caught the train to Penrith with my friends before so we could go to the movies, but this was different. To get to Westmead you had to change trains. And then I had to figure out where I was going. And then I had to talk to the doctor by myself. And then I had to figure out how to get the train home again. I just wanted a mum who drove their eleven-year-old daughters to stuff like this.
‘Mum, just drive me. Please,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what to say to the doctor!’
‘Oh you’ll be fine!’ she said. ‘He’s just giving you the results of the X-ray, you don’t have to say anything. And just call me from a payphone if you get lost. Reverse the charges!’
She wrote down the name and address of the doctor on the back of a used envelope, gave me money for the train and dropped me at the station.
When I got off the train at Westmead (after one incorrect attempt at changing trains that saw me head in the wrong direction for twenty minutes), I had no idea where to go. Despite Mum’s assurances, the whole suburb wasn’t ‘just hospital’. I found a map on the station wall that pointed me in the right direction, but I just couldn’t find this damn doctor’s office. I kept looking at his name on the back of the envelope, hoping I was missing some crucial detail that explained why I couldn’t find it. Like the next time I looked at it, I would say, ‘Ohhh! His name is Peter, not John! I’ve been looking for John! No wonder I can’t find it!’ But I wasn’t confused about the name. I was just lost. And my back hurt.
Not really knowing what to do, I finally found the main entrance of Westmead Children’s Hospital, and approached the massive front desk. A friendly woman looked down at me. ‘Hi, sweetie. Have you lost your parents?’
I wish.
‘Um, no,’ I said, clutching the envelope. ‘I can’t find the office I’m looking for. Can you tell me what floor it’s on? My appointment is really soon.’
‘Your appointment?’ she asked, looking confused. ‘You have an appointment? Just you?’
‘Yeah I have an appointment with a specialist about my scoliosis. Do you know where this office is?’
I showed her the name and address.
‘Oh. Sweetie. That doctor doesn’t work out of the hospital. He has his own rooms in a building separate to the hospital. It’s on this street but about ten minutes from here.’
I wanted to cry. I was so confused and Mum told me it was in the hospital and now I’m going to be late and I really don’t want to walk for another ten minutes and why don’t I have the kind of mum who just takes me to doctor’s appointments and doesn’t make me get the train and look stupid in front of this desk lady when I’M ONLY ELEVEN?
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Um, which way do I walk when I get outside?’
‘When you walk out the doors, take a right,’ she said. ‘Good luck.’
I wandered up and down the street for another half an hour before I finally found the right building. The waiting room was filled with kids and teenagers, all sitting with their parents. And me.
The doctor called me in, and looked around the room when he saw only me get up. I walked straight into his office.
‘Ah, is it just you today?’ he asked, as he closed the door.
‘My mum had to work,’ I said quickly, picturing her currently lying in bed listening to ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ while on her second bottle of wine.
‘Sit down, please,’ he gestured. I had been awkwardly standing in the middle of the room. ‘How did you get here? Did your mum drop you off?’
‘No, um, I caught the train. And then walked from the station.’
‘That’s quite a long walk,’ he said. ‘I hope you didn’t have to come far on the train?’
‘Just from the Blue Mountains,’ I replied, avoiding his eyes.
He stared at me in silence for a few seconds. Like there had been a glitch in the matrix in his office and his brain was trying to compute the nonsensical situation in front of him.
‘Well, okay,’ he finally said. ‘Let’s look at your X-rays, shall we?’
He told me that I had moderate scoliosis, and after that I have no idea what he said. I just kept smiling and nodding (exactly like I do now when someone talks about politics). He said something about a brace and physio and exercises and needing to see him again. Then he pulled out a voice recorder to say what he wanted his receptionist to type in my file. He started with, ‘Patient Rosanna Waterland. Eleven years old. Rosanna has attended the appointment by herself today . . .’ He suddenly stopped recording.
‘Actually, I can finish recording this later,’ he smiled. ‘We’re pretty much done here. Can you please ask your mum to call me? Just so we can go over your results and what needs to come next. Are you . . . Will you be okay getting home?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I know the way now.’
It wasn’t the worst thing my mum had made me do, by far, but there is nothing like knowing that the person you’re talking to really pities you. That doctor, and the desk lady before him, really, really pitied me. And I felt like it was my fault. Like I just needed to act a little more confident. I just needed to look at the map a little more carefully. This whole thing wouldn’t have looked as bad if I had just handled it better.
When I got back to my local station, I called Mum on the payphone (‘It’sRosieI’matthestationpleasescomeandgetme’), and settled in for what would be at least an hour wait.
Considering I couldn’t even get my mum to drive me to the doctor (and she never called him by the way, so here’s hoping moderate scoliosis doesn’t get progressively worse!), I wasn’t hopeful that she or Brian would drive the one-hour round trip to pick me up after cross-country regionals. So not only was I doomed to humiliate myself by competing in a race I had no hope of finishing, I wasn’t even sure how I was going to get home afterwards. This is why I never run.
Two hundred kids lined up at the starting line. All of them were stretching and wearing sweatbands and jogging on the spot. I was not a natural fit in such an environment. I was petrified of doing something stupid to reveal my ineptitude, like running in the opposite direction to everyone else when the gun went off. I just stood quietly, and tried not to make any sudden moves.
Then the time came. The gun went off, and everybody started running. I figured I could at least blend in for the first couple of hundred metres, but within about thirty seconds, I was lagging behind. And within about a minute, I was barely keeping up with the section of kids who were clearly there on some kind of special program. I think one of them may have been missing a leg. And he was beating me.
I was already exhausted, and I just wanted the whole thing to be over. I had been excited by my green ribbon, but this was just getting ridiculous now. I was not built to run. Plus, I really, really didn’t want to. So, remembering that before the race, they told us medical attention would be available as needed throughout the course, I did the only thing I could think of to do.
‘Fuck this,’ I thought, and took a dive.
It wasn’t a particularly convincing one, since I was scared I would hurt myself if I actually fell over for real. So basically one second I was running, and the next . . . I just sort of sat down. I fell dramatically into a comfortable sitting position, put my hand up, and waited for the medical staff.
A very enthusiastic young guy with a walkie-talkie made his way over to me. ‘Hey! Are you okay? What’s happened?’
I hadn’t really thought of that.
‘Oh . . . Um . . . Ow . . . My . . . Ankle? My ankle really hurts! I twisted it and then I fell! I heard a crack . . . sound, thing.’
‘Can you take your shoe off?’ he asked, reaching for my foot.
‘OW! No! Please don’t touch it! Um, ow! Oh, owww. I’m in so much pain.’
Now, I figured at this point he’d help me limp back to the starting line, then someone would call my mum or Brian, and given my horrific injuries, they’d have to come and pick me up. That way I’d get a lift home, and I’d be able to forever maintain that I was on track to win that race if it hadn’t been for my damn injury. I would be the athlete that could have been a legend, if everything hadn’t gone so horribly wrong.
Then things started to take a turn.
‘Yeah, we’re going to need the ambulance here,’ enthusiastic young guy said into his walkie-talkie. ‘Possible ankle fracture. At least a bad sprain. Student is in severe pain.’
Uh oh.
Within a few minutes, the ambulance showed up. They put me on a stretcher and loaded me in the back. This was all getting away from me very quickly. We then drove around the cross-country track, picking up other kids who had succumbed to injuries. There were about six of us sitting in the ambulance by the time we got back to the starting line. I studied their faces – I reckon about half of them had an ‘injury’ similar to mine. As in, a ‘fuck this’ injury.
Those kids were weak though. When the ambulance workers asked them if they were feeling better after sitting for a while, they sheepishly said yes and left. AMATEURS. I was committed to this. I was not saying I felt better until I knew someone was coming to pick me up.
‘Oh! Owie. It hurts so much! The pain I am in! The pain!’ I may have been overdoing it.
‘Look, we’re going to have to take these two to get checked out at the ER,’ someone said, gesturing to me and a guy who actually looked really hurt.
Shit.
We were on our way to the hospital before I’d even had a chance to consider my options. This train had officially left the station. There was no turning back now.
It’s very hard to explain to an ER doctor what is wrong with you when there isn’t actually anything wrong with you. When they finally convinced me to take my shoe off (after I had to take a second to remember which foot I’d injured), they took one look at me and knew I’d caused barely, if any, actual damage during my ‘fall’. The only indication that I’d hurt myself was my constant wailing that I’d hurt myself.
They wrapped the foot in a tight bandage, to discourage me from screaming in pain every time I moved it. Then they called my house, and about an hour later, Brian turned up and took me home, where I kept limping for two weeks, refusing to take the bandage off even when I showered, because I was committed to making the whole saga seem real. I’m not sure if anyone believed me. But those are the lengths I will go to, to avoid having to run. And getting that lift home was a bonus too.
Lifts from Brian were rare. That’s why, when he offered to take me away from the house one night, I jumped at the chance.
I was about thirteen, and Mum had been drinking all afternoon. You knew it was bad when she started playing the same song over and over again on full-blast. Also when she started to make cruel comments about your face and/or general existence. Brian had copped the brunt of it that day, and by the time Mum was onto her third box of wine, he’d had enough. He needed to go to an all-night nursing shift in the city, so he decided to leave a little earlier just to get out of the house. He wouldn’t be back until eight the next morning, and hopefully by then Mum would have turned back into Sober Lisa, who was actually quite a lovely person.
Brian asked me if I wanted to come with him. I could hang out at his work, watch TV and sleep in the nurses’ station. ‘C’mon, Rosanna,’ he said. ‘Don’t stay here with her. She’s just going to be like this all night.’
I could hear her randomly yelling something incoherent from the other room. I wanted to go with Brian, I really did. But Rhiannon had moved out, and both my little sisters were home. Tayla was five and Isabella was three. I couldn’t leave them alone with Mum, could I?
It was only about 5pm; Mum still had a lot of drinking to do. I had spent countless nights like this with her in my life, and I had survived, but . . . That didn’t mean it was okay to leave Tayla and Bella there, did it? They were just so little.
‘Do you want to come or not?’ Brian asked me.
I really, really wanted to go. I wanted to get the hell out of that house and as far away from Drunk Lisa as possible. Drunk Lisa made me anxious. Drunk Lisa gave me toxic butterflies.
I decided to leave. I reasoned if Brian thought it was okay for him to go, then it was okay for me to go too. I mean, he was the adult, right? I didn’t really believe that though. I knew it was wrong to leave two little girls with my mum that night. I knew it was selfish. I knew that something awful could happen. But I still decided to leave. I just didn’t want to be in that house. I was so tired.
I told Tayla to look after Bella, and that we’d be home in the morning. Then I walked out the front door and closed it behind me, leaving a five-year-old and a three-year-old to fend for themselves in a house with a woman who was so drunk she could barely stand.
I vividly remember sitting on the back of Brian’s motorbike, staring through my helmet at the front door, knowing that something bad was going to happen. I just knew, as we drove away, that the life we had together in that house was never going to be the same.
And I still left.
When we returned home the next morning, the house was empty. During the night, Mum had decided to go out drinking with a friend, leaving Tayla and Bella home alone. Close to midnight, Bella came down with a fever. She was crying, and sick, and Tayla couldn’t find anyone to help her. So, in what is one of the bravest things I’ve ever heard of a five-year-old kid doing, Tayla picked Bella up, took her out into the pitch-black night, and dragged her through the bush to the house next door. This was an isolated street in the Blue Mountains, not a busy neighbourhood – I used to be terrified walking around there at night, and I was thirteen. But Tayla knew she had to do something. She was the only person that night who knew she had to do something. She knocked on the door as hard as she could and waited for someone to answer. She just needed an adult, any adult, to help her sick little sister. She just needed someone to take care of her.
The neighbours answered. Police were called. Family services alerted. I was right – nothing was ever the same again. The night I left was the last night we would all live in that house together. I had broken the rules: our home life was meant to be a secret, and I had let the secret get out. Now we were caught.
All because I had left my little sisters alone.