Author: Elisabeth

Out of time and out of place

Something good will happen I tell myself again and
again.  Something good, to counter
the fear that I will not succeed.  
I must succeed to counter that feeling of failure when the analysts chucked me out; to counter the feelings I had as a ten year old when Mother Mary John
told me I had failed mental arithmetic in grade six; and again in my first year at university when Delys Sargeant told me I had not answered the question in my mid term essay on social biology and unless I did well enough in the exam I would fail
the subject.
I
was home alone studying during swat vac when Delys Sargeant rang.  I had not overcome my earlier style of learning and so I
pored over my lecture notes and tried to rote learn the lot. 
After the call, I was sure I would fail, so sure that when the exams were over and they pinned the results to the notice board in the quadrangle
at the University of Melbourne, I could not find my number and so I decided I had indeed
failed. 
I told myself it was okay then.  I was planning to live with my boyfriend and thought that I might be pregnant. I was not yet on the pill.  I could not know I was pregnant for
sure because I had not had a period for over a year, not since I finished
school and stopped eating. 
To my mind then unprotected sex did not matter much.  My mother had told me that women
stopped menstruating during war time because they were starving.  It was nature’s way, she said, to
prevent  more babies and conserve
limited resources.
Still, I reasoned, I could get pregnant.  One of my university friends, Helen,
who had starved herself even more than me, became pregnant.  She had already left her teacher
training to become a mother.  I
could become a mother, too. 
That would be something to do, some consolation for
discontinuing at university.
  

See this tree, it reflects my feeling: a single blossom during autumn on a tree whose leaves have not yet fallen but were burned to a crisp during the hottest of summers.  A flower out of time, out of place.
Or is that a touch too melodramatic? 

Spilled blood

A story comes onto the radio, a young woman with a high
pitched but gravely voice.  The
rising inflexion, the voice of anxiety perhaps, until she tells us, the
listeners –  me sitting in my car
driving on auto-pilot – she has problems with her trachea.
 
‘If I get to know someone, after a few meetings, I might
tell them,’ she says. ‘And the best way to tell them, the only way to tell
them, is the straightforward one: My mother cut my throat.’
Different voices cut in.  The girl’s father tells of the days before the cutting, how
he had not noticed that his wife had been praying more than usual.
The voice over then tells the story:  The day of the event, an October day in
Queensland in the late 1980s when the mother of two-year-old Susannah had been
hearing voices.
 
She was inspired by a quote from the bible, when God
ordered Isaac to make a sacrifice of his son.
 
And so this mother laid out her two year old daughter on a
sheep skin rug on the bench.  
She put on the oven.  She
sterilized knives and when the voices took over she went to her daughter, who
had put up her hands to fend off the blade, and proceeded to cut her  throat.
My mind reels to take in this information, to imagine the
scene.
 
The mother held her daughter for some forty minutes until
her daughter had turned blue.  The
voices told the mother then to put her child into the oven, but part of this
mother’s reason must have prevailed, the voice over tells us.
The mother struggled against the command to put her
daughter in the oven.  Then she rang
the police station nearby.
‘I’ve done something bad,’ she said.  ‘I’ve cut my daughter’s throat.’
 
The police came right away.
 
Next we cut to the surgeon, a country surgeon, who managed
to operate on and save Susannah.    He had her transferred to the main Brisbane
hospital.
 
‘People tell me that I am strong and brave, that I am a
marvel,’ the girl tells us.  ‘It’s
only now as an adult that I can look back on it.  
‘I can see myself there on the bench, on the lambswool
rug.  As if I can look at myself.  I can still see the blue stitches in my fingers where the
knife cut when I tried to fend it off. 
But I have most trouble with my mother today, not so much that she did
this thing, but that she will not talk about it.  She never talks about it and she has not said she was
sorry.’
The story jags its way into my consciousness.  I take it over.  All these questions I want to ask.
The girl goes on to tell us the listeners, how she does
not see herself as particularly strong, but she has a belief that given she has
survived then she must be here for a reason.  there must be some purpose.
And my hackles go up.  This stuff of being here for a reason.
The family were Seventh Day Adventists, firm believers,
but something else must have happened in that mother’s mind to cause her to
want to make this ultimate sacrifice.
The father breaks down on the radio when he describes the
sight of his daughter in the hospital, a two year old in a nappy with tubes
coming out of her neck. 
 
He tells us how it was when he went back home, that a
friend had come along to help him to clean up. 
The friend broke down and the father had to comfort him.
‘Who’d have thought there could be so much blood,’ the
father says.  And my imagination
kicks in all over again.