Terry and I stayed together and one night things got serious pretty quickly. We were at the newly opened Robinvale Community Arts Centre for the footy end-of-season bash when our best mates Glen and Colleen suddenly took to the stage and grabbed the mic. ‘We’d like to formally announce to everyone here tonight that we’re engaged to be married!’
Yaaay! Woohoo! Clapping. Wolf whistles and wild, drunken cheering. Once the applause subsided and another wave of beer and champagne had washed through the club, people turned to me and Terry and slurred, ‘Youse guys should get engaged, too!’
We looked at each other. ‘D’ya think?’ I asked Terry.
Terry looked taken aback. ‘Dunno, Kerry. D’ya reckon we should?’
‘I suppose so,’ I replied. ‘What do you think?’
Terry smiled. ‘Oh, yeah, fucken alright! Do you wanna get married?’
‘Oh yeah,’ I said laughing, ‘I guess so!’
So after an hour of umm-ing and ahh-ing we were up onstage, engaged and soaking up the considerably drunker applause, good wishes and cries of ‘Terry and Kerry forev-ahhh!’
In a small town, news travels like the wind so by 11pm my mother and all my sisters knew about my rapid-fire engagement. ‘What are you thinking? You don’t decide to get married after five minutes of thought!’ they lectured me.
‘I didn’t,’ I shot back. ‘I thought about it for an hour!’
I had even taken some quiet time off on my own, while the band was on a break and the best and fairest awards were being announced, to consider the implications of being Terry’s wife. I came to the conclusion I could make a go of it. Six months later – before we’d lifted a finger to plan our wedding – Terry took off to Darwin for an extended holiday with a couple of mates from Robinvale. When he returned, he brought back with him the most adorable souvenir – a new fiancee by the name of Simone.
‘Obviously it’s over between you and me,’ he said.
‘Oh, do you think?’ I replied.
I wasn’t at all heartbroken by the turn of events. We were both growing up and apart and our relationship had clearly run its course. I look back at myself at that age and see a kid who felt destined to hook up with the first person who showed long-term interest in her – even though I always tried to project the opposite image. Despite all the things I’d been through, by the time I turned eighteen I was still a naive, vulnerable girl. I had no experience with money, I had no idea of stability or somewhere to call home. The only long-term experience I’d had with men was with Terry and that had been a twisted and tangled journey that really left me none-the-wiser and – apparently – barren.
I’d walk past arcades and milk-bars where kids played pinball machines and think the noisy contraptions were a metaphor for my life. I was the shiny silver ball ricocheting off the bumpers and the harsh realities of life.
In towns like Robinvale being eighteen was like being thirty-five. Back then girls had two choices: you could either marry in the town and settle down to have a family or you could leave and go to Melbourne to become a police officer or a nurse. All of my sisters were married at eighteen and had kids by twenty. As far as I could see they were on a fast track to middle-age – a slightly depressing and horrifying notion. Now that I wasn’t getting married to Terry, I was at a loose end, drifting along just waiting for something to happen. I had dropped out of school halfway through year twelve and was working at the refrigeration firm. I was going nowhere fast, or so I thought.
Then I was abducted.
One day Mum organised for me to visit some family friends, Geoff and Judy. They owned a car repair business where I’d done some work, and I’d babysit their kids now and then. On this particular day I was supposed to go to their house after work for dinner. Geoff swung by to pick me up and when I climbed into his car he said we had to collect his young son from football practice. ‘Sure, no worries,’ I said.
I almost didn’t notice as Geoff drove straight past the football fields. He kept driving, and driving. Confused, and increasingly wary, I asked him what was going on and he just said that my mum and the family had organised a little getaway for me and not to worry. I looked around inside the car and noticed a large bag behind Geoff’s seat that looked a lot like one of Mum’s.
It was well and truly after dark when we pulled up at a road house. There Geoff handed me over to a couple of strangers – two Greek guys. Then he turned around and drove off while the Greek guys put me in their car and headed to a country town a few hundred kilometres away from Robinvale. For the next three months I was virtually held captive by these people – primarily one of them – and forced to live in a house with his wife and two kids and work in his restaurant. When I wasn’t waiting on tables I was literally locked in a bedroom. I didn’t have a single phone conversation and no one explained why I was there or what it was all about. No one came looking for me. In fact, back in Robinvale, no one really noticed or cared I was missing. Years later my younger brother said he’d always figured I’d ‘just run away’.
At night I dressed in a pink uniform, put on pink eye shadow and served customers in the restaurant. The customers would often say how lovely I looked. The place had a large tape deck on the back counter and I would constantly play ‘Dancing on the Ceiling’ by Lionel Richie loudly. I’d be told to turn it down but the song was an escape for me – I could think of better things when I was listening to it. Nowadays whenever I hear it I get a chill up my spine.
I was in servitude to these random acquaintances of family friends for three months before I thought ‘enough is enough’ and escaped by climbing out of the bathroom window and boarding a bus to Melbourne. I found out later that I’d been sent away to work in order to ‘give Mum a break’. She’d been struggling for years and was trying to look after my younger brother. He’d grown a little rebellious – he was a bit of a drinker and fighter to boot. He’d been prevented from attending Dad’s funeral because he’d been deemed too young at the time, and carried a lot of anger back then because he’d been denied the chance to say goodbye.
In Melbourne I linked up with an older girl named Anne – one of the girls in high school who I’d befriended when I moved up a couple of classes. We weren’t exactly close but at least I knew her. Anne worked in the city in a shop that sold coats, hats and gloves and she let me stay with her at a little house in Caulfield. After a fairly uneventful three months in the big smoke, I decided to go back ‘home’. But in the six months since I climbed into the car to ‘go to Geoff and Judy’s for dinner’, Mum had changed her phone number and moved to a smaller, cheaper house in Mildura ninety kilometres north-west of Robinvale. I shed a tear when I realised she hadn’t even bothered to give me her new number.
Robinvale was changing and shutting down. There were better job prospects elsewhere and a few of my older siblings had moved on. So I, too, left behind the town I’d grown up in, played basketball in, got pregnant in, had a forced abortion in, got engaged in, got stalked in and got abducted from, and headed to Mildura – the town I’d get raped in.