the kids formed a circle around us and chanted, ‘Fight, fight, fight’.
Paul Hiller’s eyes were wide and his face went white. He looked angry, but mostly he looked surprised. My face was probably the same. We fought because we’d started, and we were full of adrenaline, so we had to keep going. He kicked me in the shins, I pulled his hair and bit his arm.
Everything was static and fuzz except for the grunts I was making and the slapping sounds our limbs made when we hit each other.
When I think about it, it was kind of like sex. I suddenly found myself halfway through and I couldn’t quite remember how it started except that I possibly overreacted to something he did, and those small, mean, ancient circuits in my brain that run reactions and appendages just the same in dogs, bees and crocodiles kicked in, and even as that realisation blossomed in my mind, it was too late to stop.
Mrs Wong broke us up.
That fight with Paul Hiller was the beginning of my parental-separation, trauma-reactive behavioural problems. I was in Year 3.
I went to visit my dad that weekend. He was already thinner. Dad and I shared an egg-and-lettuce sandwich. He said he had taken up yoga and was planning to start a course in wine-making.
He asked me about school and I told him it was good. I didn’t tell him about hitting Paul Hiller, or about the counselling, or about the foster-home. I wanted him to ask me. I wanted him to perceive it the way he’d always known when I needed to go to the toilet or when I hadn’t brushed my teeth before bed. He didn’t see it, though. He was too busy thinking about himself.
When you don’t see me, I feel angry and frightened.
At the same time I was relieved, because if he didn’t know about those things, which were out in the open, he didn’t know about what I’d told the Winters at dinner. Or maybe he did know and it hurt him so much that he couldn’t take in any more information that had anything to do with me.
I asked him if we could go home now. Then he cried and said he wished he could hold me. It was weird. I hadn’t seen him cry before. His face kept crumpling and twisting. He would take in big breaths and hold them, and let them go in a whoosh, as though he was practising for underwater swimming.
I swung my feet under the chair and looked around the room while I waited for him to finish. All the time a thought was running through my head, blinking like one of those mobile street signs. I broke him. I broke him. One of the other men was crying too. They all looked ill under the fluorescent lights.
That night I had bad dreams so I never went back. When Itsy went I told her I’d wait for him to come home but he never did.
Our family wasn’t religious, so I didn’t really know how to do it, but I tried praying. I shut my eyes tight and I pressed my hands together, the way kids did on television and asked God to fix it. I’ve never understood about God. At the Catholic school I went to later we prayed every day in Religious Studies. The Brothers and Sisters were so convinced it would work. It’s still mysterious and vague to me, like electricity, or car engines – even when someone explains how it works, it’s still incomprehensible and magic.
I’m doing it now.
The anxiety is crashing over me in waves so powerful that it pins me down and makes my body twitch. I’m doing the breathing. I’m wishing that my father would come and rescue me. He never will. He can’t because he’s broken.
7
L ONE
I don’t know how long the Red Man has been shaking me. It feels like hours. My body aches inside and out. My head fuzzes and throbs like a radio out of tune.
I’m Gretel. I’m Briar Rose and Little Red Cap. Why is it always the girls who suffer in those fairy tales? The boys find tricky ways out. The boys come home with a fortune in gold.
‘I’m not going to talk about Dad. I’m not doing this, any of this any more. I don’t have to.’
He puts his hands on the sides of
Paul Hiller’s eyes were wide and his face went white. He looked angry, but mostly he looked surprised. My face was probably the same. We fought because we’d started, and we were full of adrenaline, so we had to keep going. He kicked me in the shins, I pulled his hair and bit his arm.
Everything was static and fuzz except for the grunts I was making and the slapping sounds our limbs made when we hit each other.
When I think about it, it was kind of like sex. I suddenly found myself halfway through and I couldn’t quite remember how it started except that I possibly overreacted to something he did, and those small, mean, ancient circuits in my brain that run reactions and appendages just the same in dogs, bees and crocodiles kicked in, and even as that realisation blossomed in my mind, it was too late to stop.
Mrs Wong broke us up.
That fight with Paul Hiller was the beginning of my parental-separation, trauma-reactive behavioural problems. I was in Year 3.
I went to visit my dad that weekend. He was already thinner. Dad and I shared an egg-and-lettuce sandwich. He said he had taken up yoga and was planning to start a course in wine-making.
He asked me about school and I told him it was good. I didn’t tell him about hitting Paul Hiller, or about the counselling, or about the foster-home. I wanted him to ask me. I wanted him to perceive it the way he’d always known when I needed to go to the toilet or when I hadn’t brushed my teeth before bed. He didn’t see it, though. He was too busy thinking about himself.
When you don’t see me, I feel angry and frightened.
At the same time I was relieved, because if he didn’t know about those things, which were out in the open, he didn’t know about what I’d told the Winters at dinner. Or maybe he did know and it hurt him so much that he couldn’t take in any more information that had anything to do with me.
I asked him if we could go home now. Then he cried and said he wished he could hold me. It was weird. I hadn’t seen him cry before. His face kept crumpling and twisting. He would take in big breaths and hold them, and let them go in a whoosh, as though he was practising for underwater swimming.
I swung my feet under the chair and looked around the room while I waited for him to finish. All the time a thought was running through my head, blinking like one of those mobile street signs. I broke him. I broke him. One of the other men was crying too. They all looked ill under the fluorescent lights.
That night I had bad dreams so I never went back. When Itsy went I told her I’d wait for him to come home but he never did.
Our family wasn’t religious, so I didn’t really know how to do it, but I tried praying. I shut my eyes tight and I pressed my hands together, the way kids did on television and asked God to fix it. I’ve never understood about God. At the Catholic school I went to later we prayed every day in Religious Studies. The Brothers and Sisters were so convinced it would work. It’s still mysterious and vague to me, like electricity, or car engines – even when someone explains how it works, it’s still incomprehensible and magic.
I’m doing it now.
The anxiety is crashing over me in waves so powerful that it pins me down and makes my body twitch. I’m doing the breathing. I’m wishing that my father would come and rescue me. He never will. He can’t because he’s broken.
7
L ONE
I don’t know how long the Red Man has been shaking me. It feels like hours. My body aches inside and out. My head fuzzes and throbs like a radio out of tune.
I’m Gretel. I’m Briar Rose and Little Red Cap. Why is it always the girls who suffer in those fairy tales? The boys find tricky ways out. The boys come home with a fortune in gold.
‘I’m not going to talk about Dad. I’m not doing this, any of this any more. I don’t have to.’
He puts his hands on the sides of
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