Call Me Cruel (3 page)

Despite the assaults listed above, and all the others, Carol continued to live with McCann through the second half of the 1990s. After every attack she told herself, ‘I've got over this hurdle,' and hoped things would get better. This is quite common with domestic violence, where victims often return to their abusers a number of times before leaving for good. Things didn't get better for Carol, whom McCann continued to hit and abuse and belittle and isolate.

She decided to withhold a small amount of her wages from him and put it in a bank account. One night he went through her bag and found the bank book. This started a massive argument, and he bashed her and grabbed a knife and stabbed her. Then he threw her out of the house and onto a marble walkway and slammed the door. There was blood everywhere and Carol had several broken ribs. Somehow she managed to get up and started to walk towards her mother's place, but before long she collapsed on the footpath. There she was found at 2.00 a.m. by Kylie, who had been out and was walking home. She helped Carol to Louisa's and called a doctor. He wanted her to have McCann charged with assault but she refused. Carol says Kylie went back to her place with an iron bar but McCann refused to open the door. Kylie sought psychiatric help after this incident: she wanted to kill both her stepfather and herself.

Carol was taken up to her sister Joy's place at Green Point north of Sydney, a region known as the Central Coast or, to locals, simply as the Coast. But once she'd recovered, she went back to McCann. He still had total control over her and kept her as isolated as possible from other people, always wanting to know where she was, checking the grocery dockets to see how much she'd spent. The violence became even more frequent. Finally, on 30 July 1998, it came to a head. They were at the club in the evening and he asked her for more money to put through the machines. She told him he couldn't have any and left the club by herself. He followed her out in a fury and attacked her on the street, bashing and kicking.

Kylie actually witnessed some of this assault. She was driving past in a friend's car and saw McCann hit Carol in the face. ‘That was my mother,' Kylie said to the driver.

‘Are you sure?'

‘I think I know my own mother! Turn around and go to the police station!'

When they arrived, Kylie ran inside and said, ‘My mum is being bashed on the corner.' Two police raced to the scene and spoke with the couple. When Kylie later saw Carol, she had a lot of blood on her face and clothes, and cuts to her nose and lip, a swollen right eye and cheek, and grazes and abrasions on her left elbow and her hands.

Carol was taken to Bankstown Hospital, where she spent three weeks and had part of her face rebuilt. She describes this as a turning point in her life. An apprehended violence order was taken out on McCann, and after Carol was released from hospital she spent three months in a refuge, away from Sydney so he couldn't find her. She decided to move to the Coast, where her mother now lived at Erina. The night of the attack was the last time she saw McCann, apart from when she went to court to give evidence against him a few years later.

Kylie had one more encounter with her stepfather. Her relationship with Troy Myers had ended, and when she was eighteen she began going out with Dean Lucan, a young bartender at the Regents Park Bowling Club. He was a quiet man, a champion at lawn bowls, and Kylie started to play too. They lived together in a flat in Auburn and things seemed to be going well. The family say Dean was a calm young man and had a calming effect on Kylie while they were together.

One Friday night in 1999, they were in the club with two other people after closing time, having a drink while Dean counted the night's takings. Suddenly a masked man wielding a pistol came in and pointed the gun at Kylie's head. He yelled at Dean, ‘If you know what's good for you, you'll pack the money in the bag, or she's going to get it!'

Dean gave the man the money and he left. Kylie was sure it was Robert McCann. She told the police of her suspicions, but there was insufficient evidence and he was never charged with the robbery. Carol says that after this Kylie became depressed, had counselling and left Dean. She went to live for a while with Louisa.

Robert McCann continued to attack women and, like many abusers, to deny responsibility for his actions. In 2002 he was convicted of bashing and raping his flatmate, an Asian student. He proclaimed his innocence, and at his sentencing, when his record of violence during his marriage came up, he said, ‘I never deliberately set out to hurt or harm my wife.' He accused Carol of behaving in a manner ‘that triggered off my behaviour'. He was sentenced to a jail term of at least four years and nine months.

*

After leaving Dean, Kylie started a relationship with a man named Ben in Victoria. Carol thinks she might have met him on the internet. Ben came up to meet the family, and it turned out he was from a big, religious family. Without warning, Kylie packed her bags and moved to Melbourne, where by December 2000 she'd got a flat by herself at Moonee Ponds and a job at Coles. She also did some work as a nurse's assistant: she'd always been interested in helping people professionally and had done some volunteer work as an ambulance officer.

Ben lived with his family not far from Kylie's new home. Leanne thinks he was a Catholic and that Kylie might have become a Catholic for a while. Carol thought they were lovely people, but she didn't think that Ben, who was interested in computers, was Kylie's sort. One night Kylie went to a restaurant with Ben's family and met Sean Labouchardiere. He was thirty years old, ten years older than her, a handsome man with blond hair, and had been in the navy for six years. Based in Sydney, he'd come to Melbourne to sit an examination for the police force, thinking he might like a change.

They got talking and Sean gave Kylie a lift home from the restaurant, and the next day after he did the police exam he found her waiting for him. That night they watched some videos at her place. Sean returned to Sydney and Kylie started sending him five to ten text messages a day. She said her relationship was in trouble and asked Sean if he'd go out with her if she broke up with Ben. Sean would later learn that this was one of Kylie's characteristics: she was great one for change but liked to plan her changes in advance. He agreed with her suggestion.

He transferred to Melbourne and they began to see each other. She was loud, sometimes stroppy, while he was quiet. He liked the fact she was an easy-going woman with no airs and graces. She dressed in jeans or tracksuit pants, T-shirt or casual jacket, and enjoyed the classic Aussie bands from when she was growing up, Cold Chisel and INXS. She was a very organised person: she kept a diary and was always thinking about what she was going to do. He visited her at work at a nursing home and saw how well she got on with the patients.

Their relationship was hugely important to Kylie because there were few people in her life. At first she had little to say about her family, and Sean gained the impression she was running away from some problem. She would ring her grandmother Louisa every week, but apart from that there was almost no contact. She had no friends in Melbourne and the couple spent most of their free time with Sean's family.

After a while, Kylie told him some of her background, how she'd been brought up by Louisa and Maxine Cahill, the hold-up and the counselling she'd had afterwards, and a policeman she'd gone out with for a short time until something happened at work; one night he had pulled out his gun and threatened her. Another boyfriend, she said, had been violent towards her. She appeared to have got over these experiences and was generally bright and bubbly, which Sean liked. At times, though, there was something a little forced in her cheerfulness, and occasionally she'd become angry for no apparent reason. But these were only minor things.

By April 2001 they had left Melbourne and were living together in a flat at Erina. Kylie's relations with her family picked up, and now Sean and she spent time with Louisa, Carol, Leanne and her two young daughters, and Michael. In Melbourne Kylie had been concerned about what he would think of her family. His own was intact and pretty typical, while hers, obviously, was not. But at Erina they got on well enough: each side made an effort, and Sean soon felt accepted.

He discovered Kylie didn't have any friends on the Coast, or even in Sydney. She told him everyone she'd been to school with was either dead or in prison. This solitariness was unusual but had its benefits for a sailor's wife: Kylie was independent and happy to fit in with Sean's postings around the country, at least in those early days. Not all partners were so flexible.

Kylie got a job at a nursing home in North Sydney, and Sean was stationed at HMAS
Penguin
, conveniently nearby in Mosman. She would turn up at the base during the day and sometimes in the evening, expecting to be able to hang out with him. This was unusual and he had to explain that she couldn't come to his work all the time because he was getting in trouble. She had difficulty understanding this and they argued.

As Sean got to know Kylie better, he found she had a frustrated desire to help people. Whenever she met anyone of any age who was in some sort of strife, she'd do her best to assist them, sometimes even taking on too much. At work she would ring patients once their treatment was finished to see how they were. Once she got to know Sean's family, she took an interest and would call them on their birthdays. At Erina she would sometimes look after Leanne's girls and buy them presents. Sean found all this very appealing. She began to talk about studying to become a registered nurse. She hadn't done it before because she'd thought she wouldn't be able to handle the demands of university, but the more she worked in nursing homes, the more confident she became. She was fascinated by people in uniform, and gradually her desire to become a nurse grew.

As they became closer, Kylie told Sean more about her unstable upbringing, which included plenty of experience of violence and other effects of alcoholism. She still seemed to resent her mother for what she had done, although she didn't talk about it much. As he came to love her she seemed happier, and he wanted to make her contented, to give her a settled home. They decided to get married, and to announce this at Kylie's twenty-first birthday party in September 2001.

Kylie wore a dark-blue satin dress for the event; her hair was dyed a light blonde and elaborately teased into curls. She looked happy but also a little startled, as though nervous at being the centre of attention. Compared with his wedding photo of some twenty-eight years earlier, John hadn't changed much, at least outwardly. The warmth was still in his eyes, but if you looked carefully, the confidence of his earlier years was diminished. He'd remarried and just come through a bad divorce, the emotional effects putting him into South Pacific Private Hospital for a while at the beginning of the year. But he was getting over it now, and for the next six years would work part-time as a volunteer in the hospital, helping other people deal with their problems. It was a period of personal growth for him: as he grew older, he mellowed from the disciplinarian he had once been and developed a modest sense of humour.

In the photos from the twenty-first party, Carol is bigger than she'd been at her wedding and a certain unhappy tenseness is set in her expression. Michael once observed that Kylie was the sibling closest to their mother, and you can see it in their eyes, a wariness that seems out of place on such an occasion. Possibly it was part of their nature but also a reaction to life as both mother and daughter had experienced it.

The wedding was not to be held for more than a year, but Kylie took on the job of organising it and began immediately. The job brought her out of herself, gave her a goal and, even more, almost a new identity as a future wife with the right to assert herself, at least with regard to the marriage plans. The planning was meticulous, with Kylie insisting everything be done exactly as she wanted. She wasn't good at negotiating disagreement: at one point she went right over the top and fell out with Sean's sisters. They had been going to be bridesmaids but couldn't live up to Kylie's demands.

In August Kylie was quite stressed by all the planning, so Sean and she took a holiday in Tasmania. Sean did all the driving, as he usually did when they were together, and they enjoyed the restaurants in Hobart and the bushwalking at Cradle Mountain. It was an early honeymoon, and marked the beginning of the best period of their relationship.

In October 2002 Sean was posted back to Melbourne, and the wedding took place at St David's Anglican Church in East Doncaster in January 2003. Kylie wore a simple white dress with a multi-coloured bouquet. Carol had chosen a red suit for the occasion, while Leanne, the matron of honour, wore yellow. Michael was in formal black and Sean, his blond hair cut short, was grinning with delight.

John and Carol each looked at the young couple and thought about the choices they'd made in their own relationships, and the effects those choices had had on their daughter. They hoped that she had found the stability and happiness she craved and deserved, and which they wanted her so very much to have. Sean was good for Kylie: she seemed to have grown up a lot in the past year.

Leanne also believed that Kylie's life had turned around. The sisters had never been close. Apart from the five-year gap in ages, there was a big difference in their characters, with Leanne calm and mistrustful of the love of drama Kylie had inherited from their mother. Kylie was an attention-seeker and was drawn towards danger, qualities that frankly scared Leanne. She'd seen her sister grow into a woman who was always either hyper-cheerful or moody, and who resented any attempt at a serious conversation as an intrusion into her private world.

But lately she'd changed. Leanne looked forward to a future when Kylie and Sean would buy a house and have children, a future when the sisters would be able to talk properly and grow close, for the first time in their often difficult and troubled lives. Leanne believed the gap between Kylie and herself—in maturity and circumstances—was shrinking: Kylie was finally catching up.