Ghost Child (13 page)

By the age of seven, Harley was probably the most popular child in the school. He made friends incredibly easily … and often with the strangest characters.
I remember once, when he was about ten, I went out to the letterbox and saw Harley standing with a small boy who seemed to be hiding behind a tree.

I said, ‘What’s that boy doing, Harley?’

He said, ‘That’s Dominic. I met him in Speight Street the other day.’

They were using a slingshot to shoot cans off the letterbox. I watched for a while and then said, ‘Hello, Dominic. It’s very nice to have you come over.’ And he said, ‘I was run over by a car.’

I was a bit startled. I asked him if he was okay, and he shrugged his shoulders, and off they went again, with the slingshot.

So it was like that. Harley would bring home these strays, not just dogs, but
kids
, and he kept himself thoroughly occupied. Even as he got older, he was never one of those boys that wanted to stay inside. He wanted to be out and about, and he’d find other kids to go off with for hours, and I’d have to get used to the idea that it would be dusk, or dark, before I’d hear his bike come down the gravel drive. Then he’d eat pretty much everything in the fridge – four or five pieces of bread, one on top of the other, vacuuming it down, no time to even put on butter. I’d say, ‘Harley, do you want me to butter that, make a cheese Toastie?’ And he’d say, ‘Nah, Mum, she’ll be right.’

She’ll be right.

Harley’s mother died in prison when he was an
adolescent. There was a flurry of Departmental activity at that time – he had to go to counselling and he met with his siblings, who he hadn’t seen for years – and then life resumed, as normal. I searched for signs that he was unsettled, but there seemed to be none. Harley did what every other kid in the town did: got caught wagging school and didn’t do it again; got caught smoking and then took it up; he dropped out of the local high school at sixteen and got an apprenticeship as a roof tiler. At the age of eighteen, he started his own business and he was doing well … until the accident. Even then, when I had to stumble into casualty in the middle of the night, thinking to myself, ‘
So, this is how it ends. This is how we lose him
…’ I found him sat up in the hospital bed, covered in bandages and in blood, flirting with the nurses.

And what did he say? He said, ‘Come on now, Mum. Enough with the waterworks. It’s no big deal.
She’ll be right
.’

I wonder if I might begin by asking an impertinent question: how many times have you had sex? I mean, with how many different men? You may not know the answer. Many women these days have no idea. They have to stop and think about it. I can tell you exactly. If you don’t count the last time, then I’ve had sex with nineteen different men. Does that sound like a lot? It depends, I think, on when you were born. If you were born in the 1930s, or even the 1940s, then nineteen lovers probably sounds like more than is decent. Working, as I’ve done, on an Old Timers’ Ward (it’s the Alzheimer’s ward but I can’t help thinking of them as the Old Timers), I’ve met plenty of women who assured me they met the love of their life at a dance hall when they were seventeen, and never again looked at another man.
Who can say if they’re telling the truth? Maybe they had a fling when US troops came during the Second World War or something. I don’t know, but I do know this: the rules about women and sex changed around 1970. It was to do with Germaine Greer, apparently, and with the arrival of the Pill.

These days, it’s easy to find women who would happily admit to having nineteen lovers over their lifetime, and maybe they’re not yet done.

I didn’t have sex with nineteen men over a lifetime. I had sex with nineteen men in a very short period of time: in the four years between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. Then, for ten years, I didn’t have any sex at all. It’s not that there was anything special about Number 19. Truth be told, I can’t remember Number 19’s name. I didn’t give up sex because I found the right man. I gave it up because I recognised – finally, and too late – that it wasn’t helping me get where I wanted to go, which was up and out of the Barrett Estate.

Some people are puzzled as to why – not to mention
how
– a girl of thirteen might embark on a series of sexual relationships. Well, I had no parents: my mother was in prison for the murder of my younger brother; and my father – well, I’ll get to him, but let’s say he was mostly off the scene. When I was a little kid I lived with foster parents and they didn’t really instruct me about men and boys. What I learnt, I learnt from books. My first foster mum, Mrs Islington, used to tell me, ‘Nobody
can be lonely if they’ve got a book in their life,’ which is true, but when you get life’s lessons from books – especially the books on Mrs Islington’s shelves – well, real life can be astonishing.

Mrs Islington started me off with
Cinderella
, and then
Snow White,
and from there we got through
The Secret Garden
,
What Katy Did
and anything by Enid Blyton. As I got older, I moved on to
Jane Eyre
, to
Madame Bovary
and
Anna Karenina
and
Lolita
. You can imagine how my mind developed, with nothing but these books to guide me. I thought men and women had sex with each other only when they were in love. Therefore, every time I met a man who wanted to have sex with me – they were really boys, of course, none older than twenty, desperate for a bit of experience – I figured they were in love with me.

Were they? What do you think?

I’d meet a guy, agree to sex, and afterwards, the bloke would be up and out of there, before I had time to put on my pants.

The first time, I was living in a unit in the caravan park outside Barrett. I was thirteen and I was living there alone. Now, that might sound strange, but let me tell you, lots of state wards live in caravan parks. I landed at the park when I was twelve, after yet another ‘long-term’ placement at somebody’s home had broken down and I’d been temporarily put in a motel. That had been the story of my life: one placement after another.

My first foster placement had been with Mrs Islington. It ended when I was around ten. We’d all gone there – my siblings and I – while the courts sorted out the charges against my mother. After she went to prison, Hayley went to stay with a great-aunt, and about a year after that, when all the appeals had been exhausted, my brother, Harley, went to a new carer called Mrs Porter, in Exford.

I went to a couple who had no children.

I used to think of them as ‘the Childless’. I suppose they took me because they wanted a child and hadn’t had one of their own. Maybe they didn’t like to do what you have to do to have a child. Maybe they thought sex was rank. They were pretty clean people. Prim people. Anyway, it was probably for the best that they didn’t have a baby. I’m not sure a baby would have been welcome in their house. The Childless were house proud. They had doilies on the armrests of their chairs, and plastic running up the stairs so the carpet wouldn’t become worn down.

I wasn’t a messy baby. I was almost ten years old. I suppose the placement made sense to the Department: ‘Neat, house-trained Lauren, meet the Childless. We’re sure you’ll be perfect together!’

‘How do you do, Lauren?’ That’s what Mrs Childless said to me, the first time we met. She spoke like nobody else I’d ever heard. Who says, ‘How do you do?’ Nobody, not any more, but she did. She also liked to use
big words,
obscure
words – that’s one of them! – and then ask me if I knew what it meant, and if I didn’t, we’d have to look it up in the dictionary together.

To really drive her mad, all you had to do was drop your Gs.

I didn’t drop my Gs. Or maybe I did at first, but I certainly didn’t for long. I learnt a lot from the Childless. Not simply not to drop my Gs, but other things, too, like how to keep a house clean. It still didn’t work out, though. I only found this out later, but apparently I offended their
cat
. They had a Burmese with eyes like sapphires and a coat like mink. Mrs Childless told me it was a
show
cat. It wasn’t to play with; it was to be shown, or should have been, except there was some problem with its overbite, something that caused an enormous amount of grief to Mrs Childless.

I do remember stalking the cat. I remember that it would try to hide under the patio. I would get down in the dirt. It would bare its teeth and hiss in protest. It had claws like needles; when I grabbed for it, it would scratch my chest and my forearms, leaving droplets of blood in long red lines.

Mrs Childless would say, ‘Now, Lauren, Augustine doesn’t like to be handled.’
Augustine.
They named the cat after a saint. Mrs Childless told me that Augustine had another name, too, a show name, but Augustine was what they called it – and picking up Augustine soon became the ambition of my life.

‘It isn’t working out,’ Mrs Childless told the Department after the last time she had to pull me, by the ankles, out from under the house, where I’d gone in search of the cat. ‘I’m sorry but there is something very strange about that child.’

And then, I suppose, she went back to polishing the buffet.

From Mr and Mrs Childless, I went to a couple who already had a child, a girl who was already a teenager. They were churchgoers so I called them The Christians. It occurred to me, after a time, that I was some kind of Christian project, too. Whenever they had guests – people from the church, or the pastor himself – I would be called from my room and be asked to stand under their plasterboard arch while they explained the latest developments in the life of The Girl They Had Fostered.

‘She came with nothing,’ the mother would whisper. ‘Her mother is in
prison
.’

Mrs Christian was a hairdresser but she didn’t work in a salon. Clients would come to the house. The thing then was perms. She had a trolley with blue plastic rods that she strapped hair around; and a bottle of what she called ‘the perm solution’. The women came in with flattened hair; they left with springs upon their heads, like Steelo. Once, when Mrs Christian called me down to help with the solution – I was allowed to paint it on, while she held part of the hair around a curling rod – the client said, ‘Isn’t she one of the children from DeCastella Drive?’

Nobody was supposed to know that; Mrs Christian wasn’t supposed to say, but I saw her open her eyes wide, and a faint smile of satisfaction came across her face and, when I turned my back toward the sink, she whispered, ‘Yes, she
is
.’

After a while, I refused to come out of my room and participate in the salons. I sat on the floor and read. It must have troubled The Christians, because I was sent for what they called an ‘assessment’. I had to sit in a group of six other foster kids, with a large piece of poster board and crayons between us. We were told to go ahead and draw. I remember being terrified. Was something specific expected of me, and, if so, what was it? Did they expect me to sketch the house at DeCastella Drive, to draw stick figures representing my mother and my siblings? I wasn’t going to fall for that.

I stayed with the Christians for about two years. I guess I knew it wasn’t really working out, but still, I was surprised when they came and sat on the edge of my bed one day to give me some ‘exciting news’. Mr Christian had been offered an ‘amazing opportunity’. They were going to live abroad. Mrs Christian said, ‘Lauren, we really have to take it.’

I got the message.
We
did not include
me
.

‘They wouldn’t let us take you, anyway,’ Mrs Christian said. I heard the word ‘anyway’ much louder than the others.

‘You understand, don’t you, Lauren, that we’re your
foster
carers and that gives us
some
rights, but we can’t take you overseas. We wouldn’t get permission to do that …’

I could have finished the sentence for her: ‘even if we’d asked.’

The Department told me the Christians would be leaving in ten weeks. I was eleven years old by then, going on twelve, and getting harder to place. A child is one thing; a girl on the cusp of adolescence, that’s another. A caseworker came to the house. She was the fifth or sixth I’d seen. She had to read through all her notes to figure out my history.

‘You’re getting older and it gets harder,’ she said.

‘Will I stay on Barrett?’ I asked.

‘That’s the goal,’ she said.

I wish I could explain why I wanted to stay on Barrett. Maybe I couldn’t bear to leave the place where I’d lived with Jake, but that doesn’t sound completely right. More likely, I felt I didn’t deserve to be with Harley.

When no home turned up in the next ten weeks, I went into ‘emergency care’, meaning I moved from one house to the next, with foster parents who took children on a Friday night, in an emergency, and kept them for a week or so, and then moved them on. It was like a merry-go-round, but as a foster child you soon get used to it. You start to see the same faces around, and you say to each other, ‘Where have they had you?’ I’d say,
‘I was last week at the Shellays, or the Coopers, or the Lindrums,’ and they would have been there, too, although not always at the same time. Some of these temporary places were awful: there was stuff stacked all over the house; no food in the refrigerator; no toilet paper in the loo; debris strewn across the yards. If they were clever, these respite carers didn’t let the Department near the front door. They’d stand out by the gate when the social workers would come, and they’d say, ‘Here she is.’ The social workers, being harried, would tick us off, and go on to check on the next house.

After a few months of this, I ended up at the Barrett Motel. There were supervisors licensed to the Department who were supposed to keep an eye on me and the other kids who lived there. They worked in eight-hour rolling shifts. The woman who ran the motel told me that when she took over the business she could barely believe that her best customer was the Department of Family Services.

‘I cannot conceive,’ she said, ‘that this is the best we as a society can do.’ I heard her asking the Department one day, ‘Are you sure this is normal? One of these girls is only twelve.’ The caseworker sighed and said, ‘All the homes have closed down. What else can we do?’ It was supposed to be a state secret. The Department didn’t want people to know that adolescents were living in motels because there was nowhere else for them to go. I wasn’t supposed to talk about it. Secrecy compounds shame, of course, but nobody thought of that.

Actually, it wasn’t that bad. I had my own room, with a TV and an ensuite. One afternoon, the woman who owned the motel came past my room and saw me sitting outside, my back to the wall. She was collecting sheets and towels. She said, ‘Do you want to come and help?’ My caseworker had disappeared, as usual, and who could blame her? Nothing was more boring than sitting in a motel out on Barrett all day. The lady said, ‘I’ll just be folding the towels.’ I could tell she felt sorry for me. I wanted to show her that I had manners, and I was capable of things. I said, ‘I can help.’ I followed her back to reception and marvelled at the set-up: there was a set of swinging doors behind the reception desk that led to the family’s lounge room. If a guest came in to register they could ring the brass bell on the desk, and the lady would come out from her lounge and assist them.

I sat on the floor with the towels. The lady watched TV while folding the towels into a perfect square and putting a plastic-wrapped soap on top of each one. She then brought me a cup of luke-warm tea, heavily sugared, and some biscuits. She said, ‘How long have you been with the Department?’

I dipped my shortbread and said, ‘Since I was seven.’

‘Where is your mum?’

I said, ‘I don’t know.’

Then, ‘Have you got a dad?’

‘I don’t know.’

Even then, I wished I was as interesting as my circumstances. Always, it was, ‘What
happened
to the adults in your life, so that you could end up like this?’

Anyway, the owner invited me to stay for ‘tea’ and I decided I would. Her husband was there. He put a bowl of what looked like puffy pink potato chips in front of me and said, ‘Have you had a prawn cracker before?’

I said I had because I thought if I told them I hadn’t they might not let me have one.

‘I remember the first time I gave them to our kids,’ he said, ‘I said to them, “Put ’em on your tongue,” and you know what happened?’