IT WAS A YEAR SINCE I’d arrived home from Melbourne. I’d broken from my teacher and her husband and I was starting to make new friends. I’d left the nursing home to take up a job as a boarding supervisor in a girls’ school. I enrolled in a pastoral care course because the principal of the school was doing the course and she invited staff to attend.
I turned up on the first night of the course and there was my teacher. She’d moved from classroom teaching to a role designing religious curricula for Catholic school students. As part of her job, she had joined a team running a course for people working in helping occupations.
On the first residential weekend of the course, I saw my teacher at a distance but avoided her in person. I didn’t want to talk to her, but at the same time I was also glad to see her. I felt she had something I needed, although I wouldn’t have been able to say what.
I made friends with a young woman named Ann, who worked as a counsellor and had once been a nun. Ann was funny, especially about Catholicism, which she had so much modern experience with. When she met my friends, she pretended to be super religious, leading a group at dinner in prayer, getting us to join hands, everyone around the table going along nervously, then moving to praying in tongues so that no one knew where to look. She kept it up for ages before she burst into laughter.
On the first night of the residential weekend, Ann and I stayed up chatting. At some stage, she flicked some whipped cream from a bowl on the counter at me and I returned fire, and before long we’d wrecked ourselves and the kitchen. We cleaned it up as best we could and luckily no one needed the whipped cream for the remainder of the weekend.
Ann and I soon filled the role of difficult young students. I regressed to an earlier version of myself, playing up and disrupting the group I was in. I felt self-conscious with my teacher there. I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t talk to her at all, except to say hello each week. I was doing what I’d done in school, seeking attention.
Ann and I were separated, put in different groups, but it didn’t stop me playing up. Eventually, the course director threatened to ask me to leave the course. I stopped playing up and finished the course, gaining nothing of any use.
I lived in the boarding house while I was on duty, so I’d have ten days on and then four or more days off. Sometimes I drove to Melbourne on my days off, although I didn’t know why. I’d decide one day to go and leave the next. At least once, I drove there in one hit, leaving at midnight after a sleep so I could be there the next afternoon. I drove through the night with the stereo blaring. Another time, Louise and I planned to drive to Sydney on a long weekend, but we took a wrong turn and drove to Melbourne instead.
When I got to Melbourne, I didn’t know what to do. I went into the city. I went to Carlton. I wandered the streets alone. And then I drove home.
Living in the boarding house felt strangely soothing. I think it reminded me of the home. I looked after years nine and ten girls who seemed decades younger than me.
One afternoon, I walked down to the river where the school had its boathouse. I could smell cigarette smoke. Two of the girls in my group came out of the boathouse. They looked frightened; they’d been caught smoking.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Just look at those clouds.’ I pointed. Saved by cumulonimbus, I imagine they thought, certain they’d fooled their stupid boarding supervisor. She must be a cloud nut!
These same students, two weeks later, were caught outside school without permission. They’d gone into town. I forget why. Perhaps we never knew why. But being outside school without permission had a penalty of immediate expulsion.
They came to my room, the two of them, after their parents had been called to come and get them. ‘Please,’ one of them said, ‘they’re going to expel us.’ They’d come from the country to the school and now they’d have to go home. They were like young gazelles caught in a leg trap and in a panic. I felt awful for them. I said I’d do what I could.
I went to see the principal with whom I’d gone back and forth to the pastoral care course every week. ‘I just want you to know,’ I said to her, ‘that if you expel them, you will end their chances in life. You will harm them.’ It was all I could think of to say. There were no local schools that were as good as the school these girls were in. ‘They are just really good kids, really good kids, and they’ve done one wrong thing.’ They’d actually done many wrong things, but I didn’t want to emphasise that.
The principal looked at me. I had spoken with considerable passion.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘before we did the course I would have been affronted at your saying that. I would have dressed you down, a girl of your age thinking you know something. But I can see this is really important to you, and I admire your wanting to help these girls. I really do.’ She looked at me kindly. ‘But I run a school for boarders. Their parents entrust me with their entire welfare. If girls leave the school, they are expelled. They all know this when they start. My hands are tied.’
I watched the girls pack their bags. They were angrier with me than with the school because they’d hoped I would help them and I hadn’t.
‘All best,’ I said before they left the dorm. ‘It’s just another stage.’
They didn’t believe me. I didn’t believe me either.
A few months after the pastoral care course ended, my teacher and her husband turned up at a funeral. Sister Katie from the Brown Sisters had died of cancer.
I’d been to visit Katie in her last weeks. She’d asked for me and one of the other nuns called me. She looked at me—Katie had eyes that saw right through you—and said I didn’t need to be forgiven. None of us did, she said.
I couldn’t cope with her honesty or her dying. I left soon after, told her I’d see her again soon, knowing full well that I wouldn’t.
My teacher and her husband didn’t know Katie, but they came to her funeral with my friend Jessica. There was a lone piper playing ‘Amazing Grace’. We sang ‘One Day at a Time’. Katie had asked her friend Father Brian to do the eulogy instead of the Archbishop. I don’t remember what Father Brian said, except that he knew her and loved her and you could tell that.
Jessica left straight after the funeral, smiling sheepishly at me on her way out, but my teacher and her husband remained behind and we talked. My teacher suggested we go for ice-cream in New Farm Park and I said yes. Later, my teacher’s husband told me he knew I’d be at the funeral and he’d wanted to see me.
I re-entered their lives. They re-entered mine. Just like that. There was no sex anymore, not ever again, but we acted like we were friends to one another. It was almost as if the things that had happened had never actually happened.
Later that year, my teacher and her husband went to live in Melbourne, where he was posted and she had a job in the Catholic Education Office. We remained in contact. I kept the details of what had happened between us a secret. I kept the secret.
People would ask me why on earth I left a cadetship as a journalist. I told them I left to travel. Where did you travel? Melbourne. I remember once someone laughing at me. They had expected me to say Europe, America, but all I’d done was go to Melbourne. These questions people asked about my past were excruciating for me. I had a secret. I hadn’t meant it to be a secret, but once it was a secret, I couldn’t tell it. And once I kept the secret for a little while, it sealed up behind me. It was impossible to go back.
Before I knew it, the person I had been became part of the secret too.