A YEAR AFTER DAVID AND I moved in together, although I didn’t know it, my teacher and her husband came back to Brisbane from Melbourne to live. I’d had no contact with them. I hadn’t told them I was seeing a counsellor. They hadn’t met David. At least once before—after Katie Flannery’s funeral—they turned up in my life and I’d gone back to them.
My teacher’s husband rang my friend Louise and said, ‘Let’s surprise Mary-Rose,’ and there they were at Louise’s house when David and I arrived for lunch one Sunday.
Unless you’ve been through something like this, and I hope you haven’t, you can’t imagine how I felt when I saw my teacher and her husband at my friend Louise’s house. For the first time, I was facing what transpired between us: that a married couple I trusted like parents betrayed that trust. I was dreaming of monsters almost every night. Louise was someone outside the circle of betrayal, who remained my friend through my darkest years.
I felt as if I was skinless.
I was terrified of my teacher’s husband, terrified of both of them, the power they once had over me, the lack of self-regard I’d had in our relationship. I left soon after I arrived without saying anything to anyone about why. I walked out the door and David followed.
When I arrived home, I fell apart, called Mick. He made a time to see me the next morning. He said I was frightened because this was a violation of my boundaries. We’ll draw a ring around you, he said. You’ll be safe. I didn’t feel safe, not for days. Louise had no idea what was wrong. I said I was sorry about ruining the lunch but I couldn’t see my teacher and her husband anymore and I didn’t want her to see them either. She went along with my request and didn’t question me about it. I will always be grateful she did this.
The dreams became more frightening. It was weeks before my fear subsided. I was afraid my teacher and her husband would destroy me. They were bigger than Mick, although he was too stupid to know it, and they would overwhelm him and I would be trapped and they would destroy me for telling him what I had told him.
A few months after my teacher and her husband turn up at the surprise lunch, I find out my teacher’s husband is studying on campus, because he starts leaving notes on my car.
Saw your little car. It’s looking great. Regards.
How are you going? I’m back at tech. Best.
I ignore them. Work has helped me in these years, made me feel I can contribute something useful to the world. I love my job, the neatness of it, the way I can craft policy and make the world neater, more orderly, the high regard in which I am held at the institute—now a university, thanks to a submission I wrote. I am well paid. I work for important men and they are kind to me. They respect me and value my skills.
And then, one night when I am working back, my teacher’s husband turns up in my office. It is late and I am frightened because I think I am the only person left in the building and I don’t know what he will do. He walks in and sits down.
I realise he knows where I work, where my office is on the campus. I don’t know how he knows this as it is not publicly available information.
My teacher’s husband is sitting across from me and talking to me as if there is nothing wrong between us and yet I am starting to name the unnameable things that have happened.
He leans over and brushes a piece of lint from my jacket breast pocket and smiles and says, ‘There, that’s better.’
I am terrified. I talk to him as if this feels normal but I am terrified.
A face appears at the door. It is Brian, who is still in the corridor, working back, like me. Brian says, ‘Excuse me,’ to my teacher’s husband, says to me he has a quick question, asks the question, which I answer.
Brian is still standing at the door, holding his glasses in his hand the way he does. He looks at me and then at my teacher’s husband. He comes into my office and sits down. I introduce them.
They make small talk. My teacher’s husband laughs loudly at Brian’s jokes. They talk about the new building. My teacher’s husband talks about the army and how well they do things. Brian nods and smiles. He fiddles with his glasses in his lap and then sucks the arm and watches my teacher’s husband carefully.
Brian doesn’t leave the room, despite the fact that he’s asked me what he came to ask me and has run out of small talk. He sits there, his arms crossed, implacable, smiling.
Eventually, my teacher’s husband takes his leave, shakes Brian’s hand. ‘See you round,’ he says to me. I don’t respond.
After he leaves, Brian says, ‘You looked like you could use company. Who was that guy?’
‘Someone I used to know.’
I do not wish to bring my teacher and her husband here where I have found a home.
‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ Brian says then.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Fine.’
‘All right. See you tomorrow.’
After my teacher’s husband turns up at my office, Mick suggests we get them in for a chat. ‘They’re not leaving you alone,’ he says. ‘Maybe this is a good opportunity for us to work with them.’
I can’t believe he can be so casual. ‘Don’t you know what they’re like?’ I say.
He smiles, dictates a note to them to invite them to come to a therapy session to talk through what has happened between us. Surprising myself, I send the note.
It is my teacher who rings me, not her husband. She says they will not come to see my therapist. They don’t like to dwell on negative things that are now long past, she says. They think it is time to get on with life. They hope I’ll respect their confidence in the future as they’ve respected mine.
I write them a letter, with help from Mick, telling them goodbye. I say that while I accept that their approach is not to dwell on negative things, I am finding that the negative things are interfering with my ability to live my life. I say that working through negative things and getting free of them is my approach to life and that this is an important point where our approaches differ.
I say that keeping aspects of our relationship secret, including the sexual aspects, has been harmful, that while I have no wish to make them not okay, I will only respect their confidence to the extent it allows me to respect myself.
I say I do not want to have anything further to do with either of them.
When I finish the letter, Mick says he wants me to be sure I don’t want any contact with my teacher and her husband in the future before I cut off all ties. He says it is a severe response and it might be useful for me to have some contact with them so that, over time, they become less gods or monsters and more just people.
I say I am very sure I don’t want anything to do with them. I want to be free of them.
I say my final goodbye in that letter. It will be another two decades before I feel free of them.
I have seen my teacher’s husband three times since then. The first time, he was coming out of the Village Twin Blue Cinema with a teenage girl. I told myself she was his niece and have hoped many times since that she was not another girl like me.
The second time he was in the city at Bar Merlo with two or three men. This was many years later and I couldn’t believe how small he seemed. He was sitting down, so I had no point of comparison, but there’s something about tall men, they take up space. He looked as if he’d shrunk in the intervening years but perhaps, after all, I had grown.
The men with him looked like middle-level managers in the council. He wasn’t in a suit, it was a button-up shirt and slacks, and he looked like a middle-level manager too.
I watched him for a long time, unbeknownst to him. To me as a teenager, my teacher’s husband was larger than life, superhuman, but there in the mall he seemed so ordinary, so unremarkable, neither Superman nor one of Superman’s worthy opponents.
The third time I saw my teacher’s husband was a few years ago. I was walking a mountain track with my friend Cass. He was with a group of men with black t-shirts. I was coming up the far slope when I passed them going the other way.
I waited at the top for Cass and the group of men passed me again, this time on their way back down. We were alone in the bush, me and these twenty black-shirted men. I wasn’t sure it was him—I’m still not—but only because I wasn’t afraid. I looked him in the eye and held his gaze until he looked away. And I wasn’t afraid.
I saw my teacher too, twice, without her husband: once in the city at a crossing in Adelaide Street, and the second time at the Mt Coot-tha Planetarium with her daughter, who looked about thirteen. They seemed close.
I looked at my teacher but all I could see was the Russian doll I’d seen when she was first my teacher. Underneath that was nothing I understood.
I have a photograph of a ten-year-old girl. She is there by the pool. She dives in. The water is cold on her skin, the sounds of the world are softened, and she swims and swims and swims.