Betrayed (9 page)

“I'd love to work with children,” she told me. “But there's so much heartache and pain that goes with being a social worker. I don't think I'm strong enough to handle that.”

When school was finished she accepted a job as a clerk in a motor spares
shop. A condition of acceptance was that she would have to get a driver's
licence. She had previously refused to get tested after she and Peter were in a car accident on their way home one night. Although no one was hurt,
the earlier deaths of her friends and her problems with panic attacks had
left her with a deep fear of driving. Now she realised she would have to buckle
down and take lessons. Soon there was no stopping her. Her confidence grew and the world seemed to be rosy. All her problems appeared behind
her, except that she and Peter were still on a roller-coaster, together one
week and then apart again the next.

“I'm missing Peter,” she blurted one night after they hadn't seen each
other for nearly a month. “I'm going to phone and go and see him.”

There was no reply, so she left a message and stayed at home.

The next morning, worried that Peter hadn't returned her call and still
wasn't answering his phone, she rode her bike to his flat to see him. She
knocked and called but there was no response. Assuming he was out, she
came home again, troubled by his uncharacteristic silence. Then she took a call from Peter's best friend Donald and burst into the kitchen, hysterical.
Buddy and I couldn't make out a word she was saying; everything was
muddled and incomprehensible, but we recognised her anguish. Finally, the
sense of what she was saying hit us. Peter was dead. Tracey didn't know
what had happened, only that he had been rushed to hospital, where doctors had been unable to save him.

Donald was inconsolable. He blamed himself for Peter's death. He had been with Peter the previous night and they had both been using dagga and cocaine. When Peter said he wasn't feeling good Donald laughed at him and insisted he would be fine. Then he went home, leaving Peter alone. In the morning when he was his more sensible self again, he returned to the flat to see how Peter was. He found his friend dying. He rushed him to hospital a block away, but it was too late. Peter had gone into total organ failure and there was nothing doctors could do to save him.

Buddy and I were stunned. We had suspected Peter might be dabbling with drugs, but had never seen him under the influence of narcotics. Tracey insisted that he only used on rare occasions and that their last break-up had been because Peter had promised to stop – then used again.

She was shocked, devastated. The last time they had spoken they had
talked about getting back together again. Now they were parted forever.

She withdrew from friends and family, lost interest in everything that had
previously engaged her, and hardly left the house. Sad and hopeless, lack
ing the enthusiasm for anything, she listened to music for hours on end. She
fell into a pit and for half a year she couldn't discover a way out.

She wouldn't talk to her friends and took no interest in what clothes she
put on. It seemed to us that she was sleeping her life away. If she wasn't
sleeping she was wandering around, lost. Listlessly opening kitchen cup
boards as if she was looking for something to eat, then banging them shut
without taking anything. She had no interest in food or anything that was happening around her. She cried easily and refused to answer any phone
calls. She wrote dark poetry and words in harsh black letters across pages of printer paper. Some of them she tore up, but the rest she kept in a shoebox. We would find her curled on her bed in a fetal position, clutching a teddy bear and a red rose that Peter had given her, now dried and lifeless.

When we tried to talk to her, she clammed up and shut us out, still holding everything inside her. She was lost in her own dark world of pain and grief, of might-have-beens and things left unsaid. The world seemed senseless and cruel, and it hurt her to know that no one was indestructible, no matter how much they were loved. Life was posing too many difficult questions and she buckled under the pressure of trying to find answers that would make sense. It broke our hearts that we couldn't make it better.

Donald phoned Tracey regularly, but his guilt ran so deep that she finally advised him to seek professional help. He agreed to see someone, but it didn't seem to help. He never stopped blaming himself for his best friend's death and committed suicide three months later.

After Peter's memorial service Tracey had withdrawn from all her friends except Donald, as though she was desperate somehow to maintain a link
with the man she had loved. Now Donald too was gone. Outwardly, she
seemed to take the blow on the chin, get up and dust herself off, but she
remained withdrawn and seldom laughed. She hardly ever mentioned
Peter though we knew he was much on her mind. We tried again to get her
to talk to us about her feelings but she stubbornly refused, except to say that
she missed him. Her pain was buried deep in stiff layers of protective armour that she drew tightly around her heart, determined not to let it go. Her only release was the tears that fell at night in the loneliness of her bedroom. It was as though a spark had been doused and I wondered if she would ever regain her zest for life.

Six months passed before she started slowly to emerge from her silent cocoon, to put the crumbling pieces of her life back together. Although she
began to see more of her friends again, something deep inside her had changed. It was as though the memory of pain locked inside her refused
to relax its grip. She became more possessive of her friends, insisting after
they went out together that they phoned her when they got home. She no
longer went to visit them one-on-one in their homes, preferring to spend mor
e
time in nightclubs with lots of people around her. She didn't let people get
too close. Even good friends were kept at arms, length, physically and emotionally. She was living behind a wall, not allowing herself to feel too much, protecting herself from more pain.

Then one day, apparently out of the blue, though no doubt she had bee
n thinking about it for some time, she made an announcement.

“I've decided to stop taking all medication.”

“That worries me, Trace. Let's not do anything until we've talked to the psychiatrist.”

“I'm not going to change my mind, so what's the point?” she countered. “I know the symptoms of panic attacks now and I'd prefer to control them mentally rather than with drugs.”

Nevertheless, we spoke to the doctors and they agreed to let her try
on condition that she went back on to the medication if she found she
wasn't coping.

“I'll be fine,” she insisted. “I don't want chemicals controlling my body or my life any more.”

There was so little time and so much to do to prepare for Tracey's memorial service. Would her body be released in time? Who should
be the pall-bearers? How would I contact all her friends? It was all
too much. I wanted to escape to a world where death had no part. A world in which my family was complete and I knew how to be nor
mal. Yearning to sleep and never wake up, I lay down on my bed and
cuddled my dogs close, just to feel their warmth, their beating hearts.

My daughter's heart was no longer beating but mine was. She
should not have gone before me, it was unnatural. My world was upside down, everything back to front, time and space no longer what they should have been.

Perhaps the adrenalin of shock had protected me at first from the
full ravages of pain, but now its sting refused to fade, growing by
the hour more potent, more paralysing. The sickening refrain “Tracey
is dead, Tracey is dead” kept looping through my head, much as I
didn't want to hear it, didn't want to accept it. My mind was under
attack by the demons of the dead. Lightning struck at my soul. No
matter how much I lived outside of my body to detach myself from
the horror, the reality was that I would never hold my child again. No
words could comfort me. Nothing could make the truth more bear
able or less cruel.

The phone rang constantly and Marsha fielded the calls, refusing
to disturb me. She was blunt with people who insisted they had to
speak to me. Unless it was something to do with the investigation or the funeral arrangements, she was immovable.

That night a friend of Marsha's brought supper and the two of them
were chatting in the kitchen. About Tracey and then about Peter, t
he love of her life, the boy she had lost so tragically six years earlier.

“Do you think maybe Tracey and Peter are together again now?”
Marsha mused.

Her friend opened her mouth to reply but was stopped cold when two wire coat hangers leapt off the picture rail where they had been
hanging and landed hooked together at the women's feet. They
looked at each other, stunned.

“It's Tracey and Peter, letting us know they're together,” they
breathed.

Wednesday was one of those perfect autumn days. The birds chirped and a gentle breeze rustled the trees, the wind chimes played their mournful tune. Nothing had changed around me and yet everything I had felt and known had been smashed. I didn't want to face the day ahead, didn't want to go to the funeral home. So I pushed my splintered reality aside and retreated into a trance outside of myself, watching a stranger who looked like me going through the motions of dressing, driving to the funeral home, filling in paperwork and making final arrangements with the church.

I watched that other me explain that there would be no coffin in the church. We had been told that a second post-mortem to get some additional samples was being done the same morning and Tracey's body wouldn't be released in time for the service. I watched Glen
choose Tracey's coffin, not having the heart to do it myself. I watched
that other me organise a funeral notice and the service sheets, which
would carry no photo of Tracey. This was partly because time was short but mainly because Buddy couldn't bear to look at the face of
the daughter he had lost. His pain was too fresh, too raw.

We went to the church to meet with the minister, an old friend
from school days whose compassion and love for our family went a
long way in helping us survive that day and the next.

“How many people will be attending the service?” his assistant
asked as we were leaving the church office. I looked at her blankly. I had no idea.

“Er . . . fifty?” I hazarded a figure plucked from nowhere.

And so the day passed in a hive of unwelcome activity that was ex
hausting. I didn't want to be doing any of this. Didn't want to think
about what tomorrow would bring. A funeral for your child is an out
rage that is against the natural order. I just wanted to be going to work,
living in my own world that was full of daily ups and downs. I
want
ed a normal life, not this strange, dream-like life that hurt so
much.

Tracey's friend and housemate Trudy arrived at our home that
evening to spend the night before the funeral with us. I wasn't looking forward to having her stay. I had no energy to deal with people, especially a young girl I barely knew. Worse, she was a constant re
minder that my daughter was gone. Not gone away but gone forever
.
Yet that night was the first that I can remember sleeping, really sleep
ing. Pure emotional and physical exhaustion had taken its toll. With
out those hours of sleep, of blissful forgetting, I probably wouldn't have
survived the distress of the following day.

Sometime during the night Marsha woke with a strong feeling that
she had to find a book. She knew the book had a black cover but had
no idea what it was about. Not wanting to turn on the lights and possibly wake our mother in the next room, she scrabbled around in the
dark. She picked up a book but instinctively knew it wasn't the right
one. Then she found Tracey's Bible. As she opened it a piece of paper
fluttered from between the pages. Satisfied she had found the book
that had been troubling her, she went back to bed and fell into a
deep sleep.

In the morning she looked at the piece of paper and discovered it
was a poem Tracey had written. She gave it to Glen.

“I know that Tracey wanted you to have it,” she said.

Glen and Tracey had had an argument before she disappeared and
they hadn't had a chance to say they were sorry. Guilt and regret were
gnawing at him, wrecking his days and nights. She had written
about her love for him, saying she never blamed him for their argu
ments, their times of not talking, and that she loved him so much it hurt. These words in his sister's hand helped to lighten his feelings
of guilt.

The two of them had always been so close that if I punished one I
had to take flak from the other, but their fights could be fierce and their anger last days. Each time I would try to get them to kiss and make up before going to bed, but they were young and always ex
pected to be best friends again, once their anger had cooled. Neither had ever contemplated the death of the other.

Marsha told me all this about the Bible and the poem when I took her a cup of coffee in the morning, but first she looked at me oddly.

“What have you done to your face?” she asked.

“What are you talking about?” I said, turning to look in the mirror. I had four perfect finger marks down one cheek.

All I could remember from the previous night was Tracey stroking
my cheek in a dream. Later, when I woke up, I saw the bottom half of her body, dressed in her favourite shorts, walk past my bed and
fade away into the darkness.

Thursday was another glorious day, cruelly surrounding us with
sunshine and birdsong when it should have been dark and gloomy
to match our moods. Because of the rush, the service sheets were only
going to be ready the morning of the service, so Buddy and I set off
to fetch them from the funeral home and take them to the church. On
the way I bought five red roses – one for each member of the family
to remember Tracey by and one for her friend Trudy – then went in
to the newspaper offices. The morning paper was already sold out.

“Are you connected to the story on the front page?” a man asked, looking at the roses.

“Yes. I haven't seen a copy yet, I'll have to try and find one som
ewhere.”

“Don't worry. There's one in my car you can have. Hang on and
I'll go and get it.”

My daughter's beautiful face was smiling up at me from the front
page. Then my eyes took in the hateful words alongside. “Body has
been found” the headline screamed. That's all she was now. At the end
of the article, the editor had included the details of Tracey's memorial
service. Thanking him for his efforts I walked back to the car and
carefully placed the paper face down on the back seat, so Buddy didn't have to see the photograph. Later, when we dropped the service sheets
off at the church, I touched him gently on the arm.

“Can we put a picture of Tracey on the altar?” I asked. “We've still
got a box of laminated photos from the ‘missing' posters and since Tracey's body won't be in the church, I feel that a photograph will
remind us all who it is we're saying goodbye to.”

He looked down at his hands for a long moment, then reluctantly agreed.

“Thank you,” I murmured, knowing how hard this was for him.

All that was left to do was to return home to fetch the rest of the
family and get to the church. My real world was slipping further and
further away; the strange feeling of standing still in time as the world
spun past me was growing stronger.

Our driveway was packed with cars. Family and friends who didn't
know where the church was had arrived at the house to follow each other there. I avoided them and sat on my own for a few moments. I needed more time, but the service was due to start and there was no more time.

On the all-too-short drive we each sat lost in our own worlds of
memories and grief. By the time we arrived at the church, a twilight
zone had slipped down around me. People greeted me, but they were
all strangers. At least that's how it seemed. Not much made sense.
Why were they offering me sympathy? Who was this person who
had invaded my body? I wanted to run. Run as far and as fast as I
could. Into the past to change my life back to what it had been. Drama
was unfolding all around me, but I wasn't part of it, it wasn't part of
me. It was all a nightmare and I was going to wake up and laugh
about it with my family.

Tracey's face looked down on me from the altar, her beautiful smile
and bright eyes trapped forever behind plastic. Gravity was ripped
away from my world. I faltered. I looked across to see how Buddy was
dealing with the photograph. His head was bent, his eyes averted.
Each
in our own way had gone to a place away from reality, to protect ourselves from its malice.

The sea of faces that filled the church was unexpected, from drag queens to lawyers and yes, even Captain Kotze. Although Trudy was
there, Tracey's other two housemates were not. It was a glaring absence, these friends she had been helping out, friends she had been
living with, friends who were probably the last people to see her
alive.

I could hear the muffled sobs and weeping of people all around,
but remained detached, shrouded in a misty bubble, protected by
Tracey's hypnotic smile. I heard a hymn being sung somewhere far
away, heard the organist miss a beat, saw as from a distance the tears rolling down her face. But when Glen stood to talk about his love for his sister, his friend, his confidante, my defensive carapace shattered
and my heart broke all over again. I felt my face wobble and from
inside there was a great surge of grief. I remembered going to the fu
neral of a young friend of Tracey's a few months earlier and feeling
sorrow for his family. But it was not until this moment that I realised
just how deep the pain of losing a child runs. From your aching heart
down to your very marrow, a yawning chasm of unfathomable tortur
e snatches and tears at you, a cavernous wound that will never heal.

I didn't take in very much of the service, feeling it had little to do with me or my family. It was only later, when I got a transcript, that I saw the minister had stressed that God would not be mocked and
that justice was the Lord's. I do remember that the photo of Tracey
fell over during the sermon. There was no one near the picture to
knock it over, so I looked around to find an opened door or window. Nothing. There was not a breath of wind in the church.

Finally the service came to an end and the minister walked with the
family to the adjoining hall, where the church ladies, realising from
the newspaper reports that my attendance estimate had been far too conservative, had prepared a tea for two hundred.

I was just a gaping hole, no body, no substance. I wanted to be left
alone, to have a quiet cigarette far, far away from all of this, some
where I didn't have to fix a smile on a face that wasn't mine. But tha
t
was impossible; too many people wanted to talk and offer their condolences. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I was weary of people apologising for a tragedy that wasn't their fault, but they couldn't even begin to
understand.