In the navigation menu there is a section headed: Student Overview, Female.
The sisters appear first, Grace above Imogen. I click into Life Course, Key Events. Theirs are busy timelines. Between them I count four marriages, nine children, eleven career changes. Nil nervous breakdowns. They were just girls who got bored easily.
Next is Rachel V. In her thumbnail photo, she looks younger than the girl I remember, but it makes me stop to think of the child she was. Still, all these years later, I see the same look in her eyes, the look of a captured animal. Still, now, it is a face that means everything.
I scroll through the metrics and the indicators: maternal health, education, out-of-home care placements, marital (single), children (none).
By now there are a number of biographical sources, starting back with what she told us at the first of her midnight sessions through to the transcripts, and then of course all this, the notations and reports. There is the list of her causes and committees and commendations. As a friend and supporter, I stand in awe and say she spreads herself too thin; that no one can sustain this level of output.
I am dismissed. The Doctor was right in the proceedings, of course, about all of it. For every rung she climbs, the world is a better place. Those that speak of anger as a deficit have never seen Rachel at the helm.
The event itself appears in none of the written material. Nor is it my story to tell. But it appears now with the consent—or rather, at the insistence—of its subject.
‘You leave it out and what have you got? A story about a bunch of white kids.’
What I already knew at the time of the telling was that Rachel had moved from the edge of a small town to live in houses filled with strangers, then for a brief time back to the town again. Somewhere along the way she got hurt.
‘On my fifteenth birthday I was placed with a new family.’ Their name was Boland, and they were the last family she would ever be placed with. ‘If you can call them a family.’
To flesh out the details I found in the transcripts and the database: early testing indicated that while her reading level was below average, Rachel’s numeracy skills were off the scale—which was considered something of a miracle given her poor attendance at primary school. There was quite a bit about this in both her school and social-service records, notations of which ended up as footnotes in the digital files. It was this that landed her a scholarship at a selective high school and attracted the attention of the Bolands. Rachel summed it up nicely, describing herself as ‘show- and-tell for their church group—the hard-up black with a brain’. (Out-of-home-care placements was a hyperlink in her computer file. When you clicked it a cohort of 180 names appeared, each in their own row with columns of coded numbers.)
The Boland family were a white couple in their early fifties, Eileen and Joe, with an adult son called Leon. They lived on a small dairy farm on the outskirts of Sydney and had horses and chooks. Rachel missed her home town but liked the horses, and there was better food than the other places. ‘They didn’t keep a count of things.’
For the first few months, she adapted well and excelled in school. A report tendered to the inquiry included effusive quotes from both her teacher and form supervisor. She developed a good relationship with Eileen Boland and helped her with the horses. She told us a story about when Joe was away one time and a horse got caught up so bad on a barbed wire fence Eileen had to sedate the animal to get him free; it took three hours and the horse fell down and rolled right on top of Eileen, his whole leaden weight—nothing moving except his eyes spinning in their sockets, and his heart, Rachel could feel his heart pounding, racing, and finally she got him to budge enough to get Eileen free. If it wasn’t for Rachel, she would have been ‘cactus’—that is what Eileen said when she hugged her and for a full minute wouldn’t let go.
Eileen was supportive with Rachel’s schoolwork; she read the books on the English syllabus so that she could help with her essays. ‘No one had ever done anything like that for me before.’
The school was secular, non-denominational, and Joe and Eileen insisted she attend their local church each Sunday. ‘My aunty liked church too, but it was a different kind of church. This was one of those joints where the people in the pews get up out the front and talk shit.’ It was called the Ministry of Mercy. When Rachel started to arc up about going, Eileen and Joe relented, but the adult son, who was a senior member of the church, ‘kept pestering’. Leon was the one who attended her parent-teacher evening. There was no explanation for this.
During her brief evidence to the inquiry, counsel assisting referred to the reason she left the Bolands as the ‘catalyst’ for her offending and tried to draw her out on it.
COUNSEL: Could you tell us about that?
RACHEL V: No, I could not.
They went around in circles. The judge agreed she was an unhelpful witness but was reluctant to press any of it. It ‘seemed sensible’ to him that she was making every effort not to dredge up the past and to find a way to move on. ‘Let’s not hamper that process any more than we need to.’
One day six months into her stay with the Bolands, Rachel was helping Eileen hang out the washing. A magpie landed on the fence.
‘I told her that where I came from that meant something bad was coming, and she said that was rubbish talk and got all riled up. I said, “Calm your farm”; didn’t have to mean the same thing here, just where I came from. But she couldn’t see it that way. For Eileen, there was one truth in every place.’
In telling her story, Rachel kept stopping and starting, like she’d gone far enough, or she shouldn’t be telling it in the first place. While I was in two minds about her going on (I wanted to hear it, of course, but I had reservations about it being shared), Alex and Tod filled the silences with different ends in mind: Alex to assure her we could talk about something else (offering up segues into the impact of religious fanaticism in Latin America if she needed an out), and Tod to keep her to purpose, bringing her back with questions on benign detail (how many horses, how old was Leon).
When she sat up, we all sat up and that is how we stayed for the rest of it, cross-legged in a semi-circle.
Leon was single and childless and balding, ‘even his eyebrows. Like he’d been zapped’. He was Eileen’s child but it felt like he was in charge. He told her when the path needed sweeping and he went through her mail and decided what bills should be paid first. He was the one to bring it up again, the thing about the meaning of the magpie. More interested in it than he had reason to be, he started asking Rachel questions about her family, how she grew up, what they believed.
‘I told him some things. I told him my aunty said there were people who can be in two places at once, for real, and that she got pinned down by spirits in her sleep, like a jolt of cold air through her bones. I told Leon I got that too. I shouldn’t have told him that; he twisted it all up.’
She went quiet, and Alex stepped in with a story about a thing called the Fundamentalism Index. It was pretty convoluted; suffice to say there was a hierarchy, with God (whichever one) on top and women and children at the bottom.
Tod chimed in to bring Rachel back. What did she mean—how did Leon twist it up?
‘You know what he asked?’ she said. ‘He asked if they were assaulting me. The spirits. I said, “How do you mean?” He said, “I mean sexually.” That is what he said he meant and I said of course bloody not, that is sicko stuff. That was Leon—his mind went to sick places. I should’ve got out of there then.’
When she told Eileen she had a bad feeling about Leon, Eileen said she would be okay, but Rachel could sense that even Eileen started to worry. She heard them fighting sometimes, Leon and his mother. He said Rachel should be home-schooled. He’d shout over Eileen, but she stayed in it.
‘That all changed with the sleepwalking.’
As her voice trailed off we could hear a dog barking in the distance and, closer to us, the goat was bleating again. A layer of cloud dimmed the sky. I couldn’t tell you what time it was. I’d lost any sense of it. I couldn’t tell you if I wanted her to go on or to stop. Somehow fear had crept into it as she edged forward, as the story started to reshape her and leave something permanent, unchangeable, and render my part irrelevant. Suddenly I was saying goodbye to the girl in the room with a secret history, unsure of who would be standing there in her place.
When Rachel was little she got out of bed and walked straight out the front door and all the way to the river.
‘I’ve always walked in my sleep,’ she said. ‘My aunty worried I’d end up drowning myself, but no one ever tried to put a meaning on it. Leon did. Leon put a meaning on everything. His meaning. Same as Eileen, same meaning for everyone in every place.’
She didn’t say yet what the meaning was, just that an old man started coming to the house ‘who was always smiling but never really was’. He was from the church and they called him Father; she’d hear them in the kitchen whispering. ‘One day they asked me to sit down with them and Father said if I came back to church, God would help me there. I said I didn’t need help from God and he asked me why I thought that. I said I deal with my own God just fine. There were looks between them like I’d just fessed up to some bad thing.’
One night, Rachel was passing the kitchen and she saw Leon showing the old man a video on his phone. She could hear her own voice, but it was nothing she’d ever heard herself say.
‘Turned out he’d been waiting up at night to video me. I didn’t just walk, I talked as well. I didn’t know that until then…I tried to grab the phone out of his hand and he palmed me off and I lost my shit.’ She looked at me. ‘A bit like you do. I guess that was like a justification for them; gave them a reason. Leon said Father was going to start home-schooling me, and I refused, and then a week later…
‘I’d known a few people who’d done bad things, but I hadn’t really known a lot of bad people. That all changed when I stayed with the Bolands.’
No one spoke into the silence. There was no place for us in it. We waited. It was getting colder now but we copped it, stayed sitting up out of our sleeping bags.
‘I haven’t talked about it to anyone,’ she finally said. The clouds drifted across the sky now and gathered in affinity around the moon. ‘Something that no one knows—I thought I’d have a better chance of it not mattering at all.’ And to none of us in particular: ‘You ever think that?’
I answered. I said I had. I did. It was the first time I said anything since she’d sat down with us.
‘Yeah, well. Here is me trying it the other way, I guess. Here’s what happened.’
It was a Sunday, after breakfast. Rachel started feeling drowsy, nauseous. She went to lie down. Eileen came in and sat on her bed, looking like she had some bad news to tell her.
‘How do you feel?’ she asked.
‘I just want to sleep,’ Rachel said, and Eileen nodded; took hold of her hand. Joe came in behind her and when Eileen turned back to him he said, ‘It was for the best.’ He looked at Rachel and repeated the words. ‘It is for the best.’ His face was harder set than Eileen’s. Rachel assumed they were delivering the news that she couldn’t stay there anymore, and she felt some relief in that—in the idea that this chapter would be over; she’d leave Eileen and the horses and find herself another place. But that wasn’t it.
Joe sat down on the bed too. He didn’t take her hand, just nodded and said, ‘Father knows.’ He appeared then, at the door, Father; Leon behind him. Eileen and Joe got up like they were following orders, and it was the four of them standing around her bed, Leon in a white, collared shirt and Father with his cross around his neck. Before she tried to move, in that first moment, it just felt ridiculous, almost funny. I won’t go to their church so they are bringing the church to me. That is what she thought. But when she tried to tell them to go away her words were slurred; she tried to get up but she strained to lift her arms and legs. And it dawned on her that she wasn’t sick; she had been tranquilised, like the horse stuck on the fence. Inside the leaden body, her heart was leaping and pounding, louder, faster.
Joe tied her wrists, Leon the legs. To the bedposts.
Eileen cried.
Father laid his hands on her shoulders and her arms, then her stomach. He said she had been invaded by the enemy. He was not there to harm her, but to save her.
She found it within herself to release a sound, more counterattack than scream—more brain stem than limbic—low pitched and garbling, the reverberations sending her body into convulsion and expelling any last doubts in the room. Father knows. When he started up again, it was with Eileen standing right beside him, and he spoke not to Rachel, but to the demon inside her.
The three of us listened, as it dawned on us what we were listening to—offering up a chorus of whispered support, condemning the perpetrators—‘maniacs…top-of-the-range fucking lunatics…’ As the new Rachel took shape, growing bigger, and slowed it down. Careful and steady. Telling it like a story that needed to be told.
To commence the ritual of casting out, Joe passed Father a large silver bowl filled with water. Father dipped his fingers in the bowl and flicked her face with the water.
‘Tell us your name. Who are you?’
‘I’m Rachel.’
‘Tell us your name.’
‘Rachel.’
And so it went. The more she answered ‘Rachel’ the more he flicked water in her face and then down the entirety of her body until the sheets were drenched. When the bowl was empty he ordered Eileen to refill it.
‘I saw her at the door and I shouted out to her: “Don’t leave me.” They thought I meant the demon and it ignited this mad frenzy, all of ’em shouting: “He is lying to you. He is tricking you, that is what He does…”
‘I got my strength back around then and I remember hearing the horses arcing up and I was thrashing around and making sounds I’d never heard myself make before, from some place I didn’t know was in me.’
Leon was like an echo of Father, no matter how loud she got their voices flooded over hers; the more she thrashed the more water came, into her eyes and mouth.
‘There was long enough like that that I started to wonder if they weren’t right, if there wasn’t something in me, because I could feel my skin crawling and a weight in my chest—this hard thing rising up, with its own eyes, like everything I’d ever done and thought was inside it. That’s when I first had the thought, the thought they wanted me to have: it isn’t Rachel. That is what they’d been saying all along: they weren’t speaking to Rachel. Tell us your name—all their hate wasn’t for me, it was separate to me. Now I was willing it to be true. The only way I could stay alive was to be separate from it, and to help them drive it out. I don’t know what I said, but they thought it was another voice. They thought they were talking to it. There was this terror and joy in the room, clapping and crying, and they kept telling me to cough and spit. Spit him out…I did what they said and coughed and spat.
‘Leon kept shaking his head. “It is here. It is still here.”
‘Father nodded and cradled my head, a gentler voice: “We will release you.”
‘Joe passed him the knife, a little kitchen knife with a green handle that we used to peel carrots.
‘“We need everyone,” Father said, stern again.
‘Eileen came to the other hand—Leon and Joe took my legs. They all had their job, their part, and Father cut, three times on each side, I counted them but I didn’t feel much, just the blood trickle down my arms as he repeated the same lines over.
‘As wax melts before the fire, may you be driven from the living soul.
‘May the soul be redeemed by the blood of the lamb.
‘By the God who gave up his only Son and created man in the Father’s likeness.
‘May you tremble and flee…’
Rachel was bound in the room for seven hours. They threw water in her face but gave her nothing to drink. She blacked out several times. They had to retie her hands twice. Once when she came to she found they’d pulled up her shirt and Leon was standing with his hands over her stomach. She threw up.
‘All the way through I kept looking out to find Eileen, to make sure she was there. Near the end, she was standing behind them again. Her face white, her eyes closed. It was hard to make it out at first, what she was saying. “I am speaking to Rachel,” she whispered. “I love you, my girl.’’
‘And the saddest thing—the saddest thing of all—was I think she was telling the truth.’
With the end of her story—the chorus silenced, speechless, just the fog of our breath in the cold night air—she put her hands over her face, and cried.
The rest I’ve put together later. Bits and pieces over the years she has told me; details from the transcripts and digital files.
She couldn’t report it because she couldn’t speak of it. She left the house and never set foot in it again. She once wrote Eileen a letter, then burned it.
When they untied her she walked out the front door and kept walking. ‘I think they thought I’d come back.’ She had only the wet clothes she was wearing. It took her three days to get herself back to her home town. She slept on couches. A cousin said she’d keep her but the department wouldn’t approve the house because a window was broken and there were no locks on the doors. Another cousin stepped in but her criminal record didn’t pass the check.
‘They just kept coming back with reasons to refuse till everyone felt it. Everyone felt the shame. That is what they do. The cut marks on my arm, they assumed I’d done it to myself. I don’t know how they figured the rope marks got there.’
They put her in a home, and one of the other girls showed her how to break into people’s houses.