THE YEAR MY MUM MOVES DOWNSTAIRS, I BECOME BEST friends with Michelle in Grade Six. We are close and highly competitive, developing a sadistic way of showing our mutual adoration by jabbing each other in the thigh with freshly sharpened pencils. It hurts and we bleed, but we keep playing the stupid game during class, determined to see who will give in first. We’re fascinated with self-harm, sometimes turning the pencil on our own legs to condition ourselves against the pain. She calls me ‘chog’ and I call her ‘wog’. It helps us both be in on the joke of racist remarks we receive.
Kids at my primary school with older siblings at Scarborough High, the tough public school down the road, are a source of the worst ideas. Michelle’s fifteen-year-old sister, Sherrie, goes there.
‘Get a rubber,’ Michelle says to me. We giggle because even though she means ‘get an eraser’, ‘rubber’ is slang for ‘condom’. ‘Get a rubber and rub it like this on your arm so it burns the skin, and then you’ll end up with a scar like you’ve cut your wrists.’
Among local teenagers, suicide attempts are a sick badge of honour. ‘Life sucks and then you die,’ is the quote that circulates. The rubber trick is meant to give you a scar as if you’ve at least tried, although anyone who cares knows you’ve used a rubber, so really there’s no point other than desensitising you against pain.
Even so, I rub with an eraser day and night until the red turns raw, and the red raw becomes an open wound. I hope it will scab and scar nicely, but instead it festers, becoming so infected Mum takes me to a doctor, where I make up a story. ‘I slid my arm across my school desk in a sudden movement. The desk was splintering, so it caught my skin and cut my wrist.’ No one comments. I’m put on a strong dose of antibiotics and end up with a scar shaped like the underside of a slug.
My other best friend is Narelle, a year younger than me. Her wild brown hair is a lion mane; she is a lion, and I’m a tiger. We find each other in the schoolyard jungle. Youngsters lost in family sadness finding refuge in empathetic friendships, getting so close we inhabit a life together. We don’t belong anywhere, so we band together. We fear, and we fight, getting tougher and stronger.
Narelle’s dad hung himself when she was small. No matter how many seances we conduct in the middle of the night, I’m never convinced that her older sister isn’t pushing the pointer to frighten us, and it does frighten us. Lying head to toe, we share a mattress and a blanket. We smoke a packet of cigarettes between us and resort to scrounging butts from an overflowing ashtray. Our dinner is white bread Smith’s Lites crisps and cheese Twisties sandwiches with butter and tomato sauce. Of course, we use either the crisps or the Twisties – you wouldn’t mix both in the same sandwich, that would be ridiculous.
Narelle’s mum, Carol, does the best she can with two daughters. She’s so young herself, sitting quietly reading Mills & Boon novels, smoke swirling around her. A motley crew of her daughters’ friends come and go. It’s like a halfway house, but Carol prefers it that way because at least she knows where her daughters are. She figures that’s better than the alternative: to have them ‘God knows where on the back of motorbikes at parties with older men’, sometimes old men. She does the best she can.
I ride the bus with Carol and Narelle to collect food with pension stamps from a warehouse far away. A volunteer hands over toilet paper and bags of cornflakes, tomato sauce, Lites, Samboy chips and Spam: non-perishables to get Carol and her kids by, along with dozens of freeloaders. I’m one of the latter, so I make myself useful by providing an extra pair of hands to take home additional provisions. Carol has saved up her vouchers to make the long trip worthwhile.
‘You’re rich,’ Narelle tells me one day.
‘No, I’m not,’ I reply, but I know my life is luxurious compared to hers.
Friends like Narelle and another girl, Liesle, come over to my place to enjoy the middle-class life for a change. A high life. They live on Stanley Street, a few hundred metres from one another, and I live a street away – a world away – on Wheatcroft.
Liesle lives with her father, a huge heavy-set German man who sits in an armchair all day in an apartment too small for him. You can turn one way and touch the kitchen table, then the other and you’re standing in the bathroom.
‘But you’re rich,’ Liesle says one day when I complain about a long list of chores I’ve been given.
She’s right, I realise. I should stop moaning. But although I have so much, I feel terribly lonely, sometimes even when I’m surrounded by friends. They cocoon me, and I call them family, the family I choose. They are my people and they see me – or at least I think they do. We’re all running so fast from our own lives, perhaps we don’t see at all.
Narelle and I discover shoplifting, smoking cigarettes and pot, drinking Southern Comfort, and snowdropping (stealing clothing from washing lines). Adults buy alcohol for us. We befriend a group of men who are more than happy to assist, and I tell Dad I’m staying at a friend’s.
I tell myself our motley crew is all that matters, and my eleven-year-old life gradually becomes about booze and boys, so by twelve I’m pretty good at pulling off a double existence.
‘Goodnight, Dad.’
‘Goodnight,’ he replies.
I close my bedroom door, pull on a coat, slide open the balcony window on the third storey and climb onto a railing, gripping the narrow surface with my bare feet. It’s a dizzying height, and I cling to the gutter as I try not to look down at the concrete staircase and brick driveway. ‘Okay.’ I expel a breath. ‘You can do this.’
I must be a sight: a twelve-year-old girl in a long black trenchcoat, barefoot and shimmying along the side of a three-storey building. I’ve got my shoes in my coat pockets. I have to stretch to manoeuvre around the partitions dividing the flats, a silhouette against the night sky, not looking down. I sidestep along the edge of units eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. No one sees me, but I can see tenants watching TV, having dinner and drinks.
I can’t go any further so I jump down onto unit thirteen’s balcony. The door is open, and the backpackers inside get a big fright. ‘Jesus Christ! Aren’t you the owner’s daughter? What are you doing?’
I explain I’m sneaking out and use their front door to escape into the darkness, a tiger running alone in the night.
How I’m not raped and killed on these adventures, I don’t know. I’m lucky to have survived the balcony let alone the streets of this rough suburb. I feel invincible, though, and free. Whether I’m singing at the top of my lungs with Narelle as we traipse the footpaths, or I’m walking in the shadows on my own, I don’t feel vulnerable. I’m entitled to own the darkness, and I am whoever I choose to be among strangers of the night, on the beach, by a bonfire, or rolling in sand dunes. At home, I am powerless; outside, I take control.
Carol always knows where Narelle is, because Narelle never lies to her mum. My parents have no idea.
One day Narelle and I wag school. That’s another thing I learned from my friends, or maybe we learned it from each other. I master both parents’ signatures, bringing in notes to explain my absences. I’m asthmatic, and forging also helps me to avoid sport.
Today Narelle and I play truant from school to sit in a toilet block at Abbett Park. You can do a lot of graffiti when you have all day. I’m on a scholarship at St Mary’s and am in my uniform, while Narelle is in her public school uniform. We draw anarchy and peace signs on the walls, smoking Alpine cigarettes and talking about our fears. We are misfits.
We’ve missed school so often lately that the toilet block has become boring and by noon we head to the beach, where men in their twenties and thirties skateboard and lie around, spending their dole money on arcade games – Galaga, Wonder Boy, 1942. They’re notorious for supplying cigarettes and alcohol to underage kids.
Narelle and I give them our saved lunch money, and they produce a bottle of Southern Comfort and a cask of Fruity Lexia wine, known as goon juice.
We’re joined by Louis Johnson, a teenager who is wagging school too. When he gets drunk, he inflates a cask-wine bladder like a pillow and pretends to sleep on it. A man shoves straws up Louis’s nose, and everyone laughs.
Louis is the child of a Luritja and Arrernte family, stolen from his mother in Alice Springs when he was three months old and adopted by a white family in Perth. He is bullied at school and drifts in and out of various social orbits; you never know when he’ll turn up. He is called ‘nigger’. I am still called ‘smackhead’ and ‘dishpan’. The name callers are people we know and people we don’t. They’re people we call friends and people we don’t. Usually no harm is meant – it’s just the way it is, just an ignorant way to make sense of difference. No one, not even me, comprehends the damage being inflicted.
Louis drifts away again, and Narelle and I take the hard liquor and goon juice from the men and start making our way to the sand dunes. The men call us back. One of them has a house nearby. We can go there.
It’s a derelict place with no furniture. Narelle and I sit cross-legged on the stained carpet, the men sitting beside us or leaning against a wall. An ashtray is passed around, and we smoke and drink. Someone rolls a joint.
I’m almost thirteen, and Narelle has just turned twelve. I’m a Gemini and she’s a Taurus; we love to talk about star signs and read Dolly magazine predictions.
I’ve smoked pot before, just not this strong. One of the men pulls me into a bedroom and takes off my clothes. I’m saying, ‘No, no. Stop. Please no,’ and I feel weightless as he lifts and pushes me, then I feel like lead as I try desperately to move away. He is too strong for me, though, and I lose my virginity to a man at least ten years older than me.
I sober up and straighten out, struggling to put my school uniform back on. I stagger to the bathroom and vomit. I am bruised and violated and have barely hit puberty.
Mum picks me up from school. It’s the first time I have seen her since the rape. I am self-absorbed, having spent the past two days curled up crying and grieving my loss of innocence. As usual, Mum says nothing, her eyes fixed on the road.
‘Aren’t you going to ask how my week has been?’ I ask.
‘How has your week been?’
Then I say the worst, most horrible thing a daughter could ever say to her mother, because I want to punish her for my pain, for not being there for me, for not even being here right now. ‘I was raped! Okay. That’s how my week has been.’
Mum doesn’t speak.
I scream the news at her again, but she must be ‘having an episode’ and battling ‘the voices’. I scream at her a third time, ‘I’ve been raped. Can you hear me?’
Silence.
I jump out of the moving car. I roll onto the verge and run and run, to bushland along the West Coast Highway where I crouch down and hide.
Mum comes looking for me. She screams my name. ‘I’m sorry, Mimi. Please come back. I’m sorry.’
I sit in the bushes, silently sobbing. She searches for me for a few more minutes, then drives off.
That night, Granddad knocks on the door of Narelle’s house, the only place I would go. He stood outside the window for at least ten minutes before he made his presence known, watching his beloved granddaughter on the other side smoking and listening to death metal music, huddled with tattooed, pierced, dangerous-looking characters – friends of Narelle’s older sister.
Granddad pounds on the door. ‘Let my granddaughter go, or I shall call the police!’
He walks to his car down a long driveway snaking between two rows of units, hoping to avoid a confrontation. He has no weapon and just wants me to come home and be safe.
I follow him a few minutes later, not wanting trouble for Narelle and knowing I have to go back to my other life eventually. Mum has been crying in her own mother’s arms, and I’m filled with guilt for what I told her. I go home with Granddad, and no one says anything. My twelve-year-old shame is handled much like Mum’s mental illness: we pretend it isn’t there.
A few of my friends are bulimic, but when I stick my fingers down my throat to gag and throw up, I realise it’s not me, and I wonder how else I can escape this horror I’ve had.
‘How could you do this, Dad? Why didn’t you tell me?’ I slam my bedroom door without waiting for an answer, then fling myself onto the bed, burying my tear-streaked face in the duvet.
Later I sit in the bookshelf nook just outside my room, leafing through old photos. I trace Aunty Mary’s face with my fingers. She is beaming a contagious smile. Her hair is high from the large hot rollers she put in that morning, and she’s wearing a T-shirt and white shorts. I’m standing next to her on Uncle Tony’s work desk, next to his judge’s wig on its stand, against a backdrop of legal journals. We are so happy together.
Now she is dead.
Dad crouches beside me, and tears pour down my cheeks again. ‘Mi,’ he says gently, ‘I didn’t know she was going to die when I flew to Hong Kong. I thought she was just sick. She died in my arms. There are no cars on Lantau. She died in my arms.’
First Uncle Tony died in his sleep, then Benji died, now Aunty Mary’s gone too.
I can only look at Dad with disbelief. ‘You didn’t even tell me she had cancer. You must have known you would be seeing her for the last time. I was close to her too. I should’ve been there.’
He straightens himself up. ‘Mi. It is not children’s business. I didn’t know, alright. Anyway, you should be happy. She left you a lot of money.’
I don’t feel happy at all.
‘Buddy hell. I can’t change it, okay! She’s gone.’ He storms off to his office.
There’s a photo of Aunty Mary with five-year-old me at my grandparents’ house in Bicton. Despite their estrangement from my father, Paw Paw and Granddad welcomed Mary and Theresa into the family. Both Kwa aunties would bring gifts and sunshine to Bicton when they visited, and I loved my two worlds meeting in such a normal, amicable way, without shouting, violence or tension.
In the photo Aunty Mary is lying on a Persian rug in the living room. She is Cinderella in a glass coffin in the forest, waiting for me, the prince, to wake her. Although I have my fairytales confused, Aunty Mary plays along. I lean down in my dungarees and kiss her lightly on the cheek. ‘Arise, Cinderella. Arise.’
Cinderella opens her eyes and looks around. ‘Oh, Prince Charming,’ she says, delighted. ‘Thank you. Thank you.’
The memory is vivid as I run my fingers over a faded corner of the photo. If only I could awaken my Aunty Mary Cinderella again.