The Anti-Cool Girl (8 page)

This was the era of home phones, and there was only one number I could remember: the number that had recently been mine – Joe the Removalist's house. Joe continued to see us girls after he and Mum divorced, so I assumed the knife incident had been forgiven (at least, my mum wasn't in prison, so I considered that a good sign). I knew Joe would probably be home, and he was a good man, so I knew that if I asked, he would come and save me. I was also sick of the crappy new Houso house, and missed the fancy private rental where I had briefly felt like I was part of a proper family. I wanted to feel the feeling of being in that house again, so I called him.

I should have known as soon as I heard Elvis blaring down the phone that he was drunk. Too drunk to drive, in fact,
which meant he couldn't pick me up. But I was used to drunk adults – what I didn't want was to be attacked by a Stephen King character and spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair. There must have been enough panic in my voice to tug at Joe's heartstrings, because he sent a taxi to come and get me.

I packed a little bag with my toothbrush and waited in the front yard – I had never been in a taxi by myself before and had no clue what it would entail, but I was determined to come across as a seasoned traveller. I was debating whether I should sit in the front or the back when the taxi pulled up. The driver seemed . . . suss. And rightfully so. Here was an eight-year-old, alone, standing in the front yard of a house that clearly had no one inside. I was holding a little backpack, and spent at least three minutes circling the car trying to decide which door to open. Eventually he got out and opened one of the back doors for me.

‘Thank you, sir,' I said, in an accent that I hoped would convince him I was a royal who had somehow lost her private car and taken a wrong turn.

I tried to act like it was all the most natural thing in the world and that getting in taxis on my own at 11pm on Saturday night was totally something that I did all the time. I told him the address – still in an accent that sat somewhere between British and delusional – and he started driving.

When I arrived at Joe's place, things were not as I remembered them. He paid the taxi driver, swaying a little as
he did so, and took me inside. The house was literally devoid of furniture, which, although ironic for a removalist, made sense, seeing as we had all the furniture at our new house. There wasn't even a TV, and since TV had been my best friend since I could remember, this made me nervous.

I had been hoping to find the warm, family home that had (however briefly) made me feel safe. Instead, I was faced with a drunken removalist, sitting on a milk crate in an empty living room, listing to Elvis records through headphones. He made up some blankets for me on the floor of the bedroom I had shared with Rhiannon just a few months earlier. But it was empty now. And dark. It was even scarier than when Mum had been putting the knife through the door.

I honestly don't know what I had been expecting. I think deep down I had hoped I would walk through the door and then back in time, to when Mum and Joe were newlyweds, we had a new baby and everybody was so excited to be living in a fancy private rental. I lay down on the floor of the room I had once hung posters in, and cried as I tried to fall asleep.

At some point in the night, I woke up and, confused and disoriented, decided to head to Mum and Joe's room to see if they would let me sleep with them. Sometimes, if I was really scared or had a particularly bad nightmare in which IT had eaten one of my legs, I would snuggle in between them early in the morning until it was time to get up.

The house was pitch-black, but I knew the way to their room. I ran my fingers along the wall as I felt my way down the hallway. I reached out to their doorknob and slowly turned it. It was best not to make any noise – you were guaranteed a snuggle if they woke up and you were already in the bed. I opened the door and slowly started to walk across the bedroom. I couldn't see a damn thing with the lights off, but I knew it was only a few steps until I would reach the edge of their bed. I walked in the dark, arms outstretched, and when I felt certain I was close enough, I made a dive for the mattress.

But I hit the floor, hard. There was no mattress there, because there was no bed there. In my sleepiness I had forgotten that this wasn't my home anymore. It was just an empty house that my mum's ex-husband was living in until the lease ran out.

I lay there, on the floor, in the dark, heartbroken. I had reached out for my mum and she wasn't there. All I wanted was to snuggle between them until it was time to get up, and now I was lying on the floor of an empty room. I felt like a ghost in a house that didn't exist anymore.

I stayed there until morning, not even close to falling back asleep. I didn't really know it then, but I was heartbroken because that was the first time in my life I really understood that you can never go home again. And I'd never really had a home to begin with, so what was the point of ever getting up off the floor?

Joe, who had been sleeping on a single mattress in Tayla's old room, woke a little later and drove me home. Mum, feeling more responsible than usual I guess, had come home during the night and panicked to find that I wasn't there. She was waiting for me in the front yard as I climbed out of Joe the Removalist's ute.

She put her arm around me, but it didn't feel like what I had been looking for the night before.

As we walked inside, she turned to me and asked, laughing, ‘What the bloody hell were you trying to cook in that saucepan you left on the stove?'

‘Rosie's Chicken Soup,' I said flatly, and followed her inside.

It's hard to keep up appearances when your mum hasn't been home in four days. During school holidays, it's fairly easy to hide the embarrassing dysfunction in your life – as long as you don't have to go to class, there's no way you can slip up and reveal that you've only eaten Rosie's Chicken Soup since Sunday.

But once school is in session, covering for your mum's latest wine expedition gets a lot more complicated.

In about Year 4, I was at maybe my seventh or eighth school so far, and naturally I had been a premium dweeb at every one of them (except, of course, for Canberra, the clueless nerd utopia where I had so briefly reigned), and my inherent lack of cool meant I had to be careful about what came out of my mouth at the best of times, let alone when I had left my mum that morning passed out on the living room floor.

But Rhiannon and I had become fairly skilled at putting a
hazy filter on our lives. We were like human Instagram before there was Instagram. Add a little ‘Valencia' and nobody will ever know that the picture is seriously flawed.

If Mum didn't get home in time to take care of baby Tayla, Rhiannon would skip school and do the job for her. Although there really wasn't that much of an age difference between us at twelve and nine, it was never really under discussion that I would be the stand-in caretaker. When there were no adults around, we just slipped into our natural roles: me, always so panicked about what other people thought of me, would get dressed and go to school each day like nothing was happening; Rhiannon, who never seemed to give a fuck what anybody thought of her, would take on the mothering job and stay home to look after the baby. It should also be noted that the few times Tayla was left in my care, I either dropped her or forgot to change her nappy, so I suppose you could say there were competency issues there also.

Mum wasn't gone all the time, but her ‘overnight holidays' had certainly begun to increase in frequency, and as skilled as you think you are at pretending you have a normal life, at some point, somebody is going to notice that two little girls are living alone in a house with a baby.

It was on one such day, when I had dutifully put on my uniform and walked to school, and Rhiannon had stayed at home with Tayla, that we were finally busted. I'm actually surprised I didn't realise what was going on when I first saw
the principal knock on my classroom door. She gestured for my teacher Mrs Blythe to come to the hallway, where they spent a few minutes talking about something that looked very important.

When Mrs Blythe came back inside and started walking towards my desk, I was actually excited. I really wanted it to be about me. Had I won a prize? Was I finally being recognised for being a superstar genius? Had somebody found and been wildly impressed by one of my screenplays in which I marry Benny from
The Sandlot
?

I beamed with pride as it became obvious she was making a beeline for my table. Then I remembered: oh, that's right. I haven't seen my mum in four days and Rhiannon and I don't know how to use the washing machine. What are the chances this is about that, and not about me winning an Oscar for a movie I haven't starred in yet?

‘Rosanna,' Mrs Blythe said, a look of pity on her face I had come to recognise as an indication something bad was about to go down. ‘Mummy didn't come home last night sweetie, and there are some ladies here who'd like to talk to you.'

She started packing up my things, and I was mortified. The entire class had heard what she'd said. All the effort Rhiannon and I had put into creating the façade of a perfect life was ruined. Would there ever be a day at school I wasn't humiliated? (Hint: no.)

There was an old lady waiting for me in the hall. She took my hand, even though I was way too old for that shit (just another dagger to my eternally daggy heart), and walked me towards the parking lot, where her car was waiting. There was another old lady sitting in the front passenger seat (it was like being arrested by the Golden Girls), and there, in the back, like two criminals who had finally been busted after years on the run, were Rhiannon and Tayla. Rhiannon's head was hanging in shame, and I knew we had finally been caught.

The old ladies were DOCS workers. Someone had dobbed us in.

And apparently there would be no more chances. No more staying in halfway houses or rehab centres with Mum. No more staying with a friend for a few days until things blew over. It was time for us to be officially ‘removed from care'. The government Golden Girls were out to ruin our lives. Mum needed to ‘get better', and this time, we weren't allowed to stick around for the ride.

We stayed with an uncle for a while. We stayed with our birth grandma for a while. Tayla was separated from us and lived with some of her dad's relatives for a while. But nobody seemed to want to keep us. Whatever test you needed to pass to be a kid that adults wanted around, we were just not passing it. We were told that all three of us might be split up – that three girls together was too much of a commitment for most carers. Mum
was apparently doing well; she had been to rehab and was now back working as a nurse, but it would still be a while before the Golden Girls would trust her again, so we desperately needed somewhere to live.

That's when we hit the foster home jackpot.

From the start, everybody kept saying how lucky we were. We were just so lucky that anyone was willing to take on three girls, especially when one of them was a toddler. We were just so lucky that they were a wealthy family from Pennant Hills who lived in a beautiful, big house. We were just so lucky that their son, who went to a very fancy private school, was around the same age as us. We were just so lucky that the foster mum and dad seemed like such lovely people.

We were so, so lucky.

And it actually was pretty incredible. The first night we went to live with our amazing new foster family, it was like being in a movie where everything turns out fine in the end. We dropped our stuff off at their Pennant Hills mansion and drove up to their farm for the weekend. Yeah – they had a house
and
a farm. And this wasn't just any farm, it was like a kid utopia surrounded by bush. There was a tennis court, a tree house, a waterslide and a flying fox. Oh, and just when we thought it couldn't get any more perfect, we found out our new foster parents took care of abandoned joeys.
Baby goddamn kangaroos!
We were in heaven. It was our first night living with the foster family jackpot, and we were so, so lucky.

Then it was time to take a bath.

There was no hot water at our weekend farm paradise, so our new foster dad heated some up on the fire outside, then he took us to the bathroom and poured it into a massive tub. He told us to jump in . . . and then he just stood there.

My sister and I looked at each other.

‘Come on!' he said. ‘Before it gets cold!' And still, he just stood there. This was weird. We weren't sophisticated ladies, but we weren't little kids either. We'd each had a birthday since being taken away from Mum – I was ten, Rhiannon was thirteen, and neither of us wanted to get naked in front of a man we didn't know. But he obviously intended to stay in the bathroom, and everything was just so awesome and there was a tree house and we were just so lucky.

So I took off my clothes and jumped in. I didn't particularly want to, but I remember thinking that maybe that's just how their family did things, so I should just do it. That was always my way – so desperate to be cool, so desperate to be liked, I'd do anything to fit in.

Rhiannon, on the other hand, got as far as her undies and refused to take them off. He tried convincing her several times, but she stood firm. They had an intense staring stand-off until she actually just got into the tub with her undies on. To this day, I vividly remember the look on her face. It was equal parts confusion, desperation and humiliation. I tried to embrace the
whole thing, laughing as he sat on the edge of the tub splashing us with water. But Rhiannon stayed quiet.

Later that night, as we sat around the fire outside (a campfire because we were just so lucky!), the dad asked me to come and sit on his lap. As soon as I did, he reached inside my pants and rested his hand directly on my bum. I froze. I had tried to pass off the bath thing as a family quirk but this was definitely wrong. Or was it?
Was it?
I was only a kid. Men don't do stuff like that to kids. He must just be playing around! Maybe they just touch bums in this family?

But as his fingers tickled and squeezed my skin and moved further and further forward, my whole body stiffened. I thought of my grandma, who we'd been living with right before we went to the foster family. She'd told me that if anything went wrong, if anything didn't feel right, to call her straight away. And as I sat there, with this strange man's hand feeling its way around the inside of my pants, I stared into the fire and debated whether or not this constituted the need for a phone call.

It definitely didn't feel right. But we were just so lucky to be there! I didn't want to ruin everything and be split up from my sisters only to find out afterwards that some people just stick their hands down your pants to be nice. So I stayed quiet.

We lived there for almost a year and it continued the whole time. I shared a bath with my little sister from that point on, which he always joined us in the bathroom for. My older sister
showered alone, but she wasn't allowed to lock the door, and he always found reasons to be in there – like checking if she needed a towel or bringing her a hot chocolate (because everybody drinks hot chocolate in the shower).

And along with always seeming to miraculously appear whenever we were naked, the hands-down-the-pants thing also kept going. Getting tucked in, sitting on his lap, watching TV, getting a hug: the hands were down the pants. It never felt normal to me, but since his wife must have seen it half the time, I just assumed it was normal to
them,
and that it wasn't my place to say anything. And they were just so nice and we were just so lucky!

Rhiannon and I never talked about it. Not even that first night after the bath. Not even when he would go into her bedroom and close the door just to say goodnight. I kept telling myself that we were kids, and nobody would ever think that way about kids, so I
must
have been misinterpreting it. I must have been.

About a year after returning home, my mum received a phone call. It was the police, and they were investigating claims of sexual abuse made by other girls who had lived with the same foster family. Mum called Rhiannon and I into the living room and asked us if anything strange had ever happened while we there. We looked at each other, and after a moment of tense silence, burst out laughing. I've never been able to explain that
reaction. I guess we had both always known that the other one knew, and finally looking each other in the face with mutual understanding was a little overwhelming.

We told my mum everything that night and were formally interviewed by the police a couple of days later. I remember we still tried to tone the whole thing down, though, which in hindsight, I know came from humiliation. There was a sense of not wanting anyone to think we had played a part in something sexual – after all, we hadn't stopped it, so did that mean we were okay with it? Wouldn't it be easier and less embarrassing if we all just acted like nothing fishy had happened? Couldn't we just agree we'd had a lovely time and had been so lucky and there were some uncomfortable moments and let that be it?

It was only as adults that Rhiannon and I were able to deconstruct everything that went on and get angry about it. Particularly since the man in question was, as far as I know, never charged. Many years later, I saw him being celebrated on the cover of a newspaper for his charity work. When I called my sister and told her, she cried in frustration. There were also feelings of guilt in there, as investigators at the time wanted us to testify in court but we were both just too uncomfortable with it. Too young, too confused and too embarrassed.

But sitting there that first night by the fire, not sure how to handle having a grown man's hand down my pants, I had no idea what the next year had in store. I had no idea that his hands
were going to be a permanent fixture there. I had no idea that while we were living with the foster family jackpot that made us just so lucky, Mum was working hard to secure her next big shift: a man who not only didn't live in Houso, didn't live in a private rental, but
owned
his own home. Mum spent the time we were away snagging herself a homeowner. She was determined to pull off her Pretty Woman plan.

So, about eighteen months after the government Golden Girls came and embarrassed me in my classroom, about eighteen months after Rhiannon, Tayla and I were taken away in the back of a car like criminals, Mum was finally allowed to come and pick us up from Pennant Hills. Then she drove the car straight onto the Great Western Highway, and headed to our brand-new home in the Blue Mountains. It was time for us to live with Brian the Homeowner.