WHEN DAVID AND I WERE first together, I would become frightened sometimes when we started having sex and I would ask him to stop. He always did and never seemed resentful. Once I asked him how he managed to stop when we were well on the way to intercourse. ‘I just do,’ he said, ‘same as you.’ But men can’t stop, I said. They get to a point where they can’t stop. This was before he knew anything about my teacher and her husband and what had happened. He laughed. ‘Who told you that?’ I didn’t answer. ‘That’s crap,’ he said. Then he looked at my face. I don’t know what he saw, but he softened. ‘I can always stop,’ he said. ‘It’s all right. If someone told you something different, they were lying.’
After four years working at the college at Mount Gravatt, which by that time had joined Brisbane College of Advanced Education, I moved to the registrar’s office, where I had a job writing reports about new courses for committees. I loved the quality of the debate among the academics, and I was still surrounded by words and paper.
I applied for a job running the council secretariat at the Queensland Institute of Technology down near Parliament House where I was still studying journalism. The job would involve writing minutes and correspondence for the governing council and its committees. It was a big promotion.
I got the job, reporting directly to the registrar, Brian Waters. After I started, I found out that when I’d applied, my former boss at the college—not John Schmidt, another fellow—was a referee. The council was the institute’s governing body and important. He told Brian to get ready for some odd dress choices if he gave me the job. Brian told me this later. She might not be suitable for council, the other fellow had said. Brian said it had struck him as a strange thing to say and I’d interviewed so well and had such good references from the chairs of my academic committees that of course they were going to give me the job. I did have a pants suit that looked like pyjamas and baggy jeans way before they became fashionable; I’m sure Brian had noticed. But he didn’t care, as long as I could think and write.
I worked closely with Brian and with the director of QIT, Dennis Gibson, a mathematician by training. He didn’t care what I wore either. When QIT was becoming a university, I worked with the deputy director, Tom Dixon, on the submission to the state government making our case. Tom had run the school of communications, had developed the journalism course I’d done. He wasn’t much interested in my clothes either.
I know these are just reasonable expectations of ordinary men, that they might focus on what a person can do rather than what they look like or what they wear, but it made a key difference to my life in the years I was working at QIT. I had dressed like a boy when I was young, and I had missed those years as a late teen when I might have learned to dress up and enjoy how I looked. I had no idea how to dress up and enjoy how I looked.
When university status was approved, Tom was acting director. I was the first person he came and told. ‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘You just wrote your first successful submission.’
I met David at QIT, where he was an internal auditor, working in the director’s office doing organisation reviews. His undergraduate degree is in politics and the chair of the audit committee, an external member of council and government department head, had been surprised when he asked if anyone on the committee had read Machiavelli’s The Prince and David had. The chairperson had hoped to bamboozle them with his knowledge of politics. The lowly administrator on the committee, who shouldn’t know much, wrecked it for him.
When I wanted to review the institute’s records management system, which was in my department, Brian suggested David would be the person to help.
While we were doing the project, I told David I knew all the words to Led Zeppelin’s songs. It was during a conversation about memory, how strange it is what we forget and what we remember. It impressed him, that a girl could be so familiar with the music he loved.
On the corkboard in David’s office I noticed a photograph of a leaf, a new leaf on a lilly pilly, sharply contrasted against a background of blurred green. He took the photograph in Lamington National Park, he said. He liked to walk there. Binna Burra was a special place for me too, I told him. It was clear to both of us we had things in common. We went to a concert in Brisbane together and held hands while James Taylor sang ‘You’ve Got a Friend’.
Soon after we got together and before David moved in with me, I told him what I’d done as a teenager: my teacher, her husband, the two pregnancies. I knew I couldn’t be in a relationship with someone unless they knew. I liked David, and even if it meant I would lose him, I had to tell him the truth.
I got Mick to help me prepare. I asked David over and said I had to tell him about something I’d done that was terrible. I sat on the floor of my bedroom with him and I told him everything. I was flat in the telling, could not look at his face. I was still so ashamed of myself.
‘Is that all?’ he said when I’d finished.
I nodded.
‘It wasn’t you that was terrible,’ he said.
He held me for a long time. I was surprised by his kindness.
It was several weeks before I realised he wasn’t going to leave me because of what I’d done. He didn’t even see it as something about me.