Chapter Thirteen
We were forced out of the hospital while the moon was hanging on its precarious thread in the sky. There was no change from Sam. She was still the serene mannequin in her hospital bed, ethereal almost, betroth to a world marked by the living dead. When she was asleep she reminded me of a little girl - a little girl in her garden of innocence, believing in everything, and her heart knowing nothing but the love and happiness inside it.
That was how I saw her now.
That was how I hoped she felt now.
We walked into the house to see Alex sitting on the couch and laughing at the television.
‘Guys, what’s going on? Where have you been? I was worried, man’ she said, her eyes turning from the TV for just a fleeting second.
‘Don’t say you were worried, Alex. ‘Worry’ isn’t a word in your vocabulary. The only thing you were worried about is who was going to cook you dinner,’ I said.
‘No - well, okay, if you put it like that I am kind of hungry. Who is doing the honours tonight anyway?’ She looked at the three of us and smiled.
The stupid girl.
She really was an anomaly.
She was an alien sent down to earth from Mars to spy on the human race. Unfortunately, the Martian designers did some dodgy investigational work when they did their research. They probably analysed a crummy bunch of humans to use as blueprint in effort to make Alex quickly. God knows what the boss Martian would think when she returned with all her ‘secret’ knowledge.
Ok, I knew I was being far-fetched but I quite often wondered how Alex survived in this world with other humans.
‘So, who’s it going to be then?’
‘It’s almost eleven at night and you haven’t even thought about getting your own dinner, Alex?’ Jessica said.
Jessica was being far from patient now.
She was the irate driver behind the herd of cows.
‘Yeah, I guess so. Someone always cooks so I thought I’d be in on it.’
‘Yeah, in on the eating, not the cooking though.’
‘So? If I eat your food that’s a compliment to you, isn’t it? You should be eternally grateful I’m paying you a complement, sis,’ and she threw Jessica a cocky wink.
She definitely wasn’t a Morgan.
I was convinced she was a Martian.
‘You’re right selfish, Alex. Can’t you look at us and see what’s been happening?’
Jessica was not only the irascible driver but his screaming wife too now.
‘Er, no, you all look fine to me. Is this about Keish going up to the Gold Coast?’
If someone told me Alex was a poorly designed robot I’d have believed them. She should have worn a t-shirt that said, ‘my other body will fit in with the human race even if this one doesn’t’.
‘Well, we’re not fine, Alex. And Keish going to the Gold Coast was just the beginning of it. She met her real father and Sam tried to commit suicide. She’s lying in a hospital bed now holding on for dear life.’
For a moment there I thought I saw a glimpse of shock in Alex’s eyes but…
‘She’ll be right. She always is. You’ll see. And Keisha, so you met your dad eh? Has he got all the problems you have?’… I was mistaken.
‘Yes, I met my father and no, as far as I know he doesn’t have my problems.’
‘Why do you have to be so harsh, Alex?’ Dad said.
‘Am I? I didn’t think I was being harsh. So when’s Sam going to come home then?’ She was probably waiting for the black Revlon nail polish Sam had promised her a week ago.
‘Didn’t you hear a word I said? I said she’s holding on for dear life. What do you think that means, Alex? That she’s going to walk out of her hospital bed in a coma?’ Jessica said.
‘No, I guess not, and what a sight that would be!’ she laughed. ‘She’ll be fine though. You wait and see.’
The roles had reversed.
Jessica was acting like me, a pessimist.
Alex was acting like Jessica, an optimist, though with far less care.
God help me if I ended up thinking like one of the family, like Dad for instance – a romanticist who believed everything had a happy ending.
‘Do you want to come and see her tomorrow with us?’ he asked.
Alex paused, clearly perusing the question, and said, ‘er, I don’t think I have anything on, but if James takes me out to buy the new jacket I want, I’ll give it a miss. Sorry, Dad.’ And she turned to face the TV, crossed her legs and folded her arms.
I could picture it now, Alex at the hospital.
She would go into the Sam’s little room and say it was too small. Then she would look down at her and all the machines, and say something like, ‘God, doesn’t she look awful? You can see makeup certainly does wonders for her when you see her like this,’ and, ‘poor Sam. I just hope you don’t die looking like that,’ all the time shaking her holier-than-thou head.
It was a wonder the girl could walk normally with the invisible long stick she had implanted up her as a permanent fixture.
‘Suit yourself then, Alex, if you have to take that attitude.’
After a long pause she looked at me and said ‘so, Keish, who’s your father then? Maybe I know him. Maybe I had a piece of him myself,’ she laughed.
‘You are so disgusting, Alex, and I can assure you that you didn’t.’
‘So who is it then?’
I looked at Dad for approval.
He nodded.
‘It’s our uncle, Stan.’
I couldn’t believe it. I saw more than a glimmer of shock in the girl’s eyes, more than a gaping mouth trying to get words out. She looked like she had seen herself in the mirror with a barber shaving all her hair off for a part in the Sydney Mardi Gras.
‘You’re kidding, aren’t you? He’s an old man,’ she managed to say after a very long pause.
‘No, I’m not kidding.’
‘I can’t believe it. Our own uncle, Mum’s brother. The dirty old swine was having it off with Sam. That’s gross, completely feral,’ she said, screwing her face up.
‘It’s true, but he wasn’t having it off with Sam as you put it, he was raping her. It was unconsented sex.’ I had to make sure she knew the truth.
‘Wow, that’s really disgusting, but I always knew that man was a dirty old perve.’
‘Why do you say that? He never looked that way to me at the time,’ Dad said frowning.
‘Oh, you know, he always a flirt, and he thought he was God’s gift.’
I looked at Alex.
She was always a flirt.
She thought she was God’s gift to men.
Perhaps she was a product of him too.
And suddenly she turned away from us all.
‘So, do you think Sam will die?’ she said. It was an obvious change of subject.
‘No,’ Dad said, ‘and don’t change the topic on me, Alex. I want to know why you called Stan a dirty old perve.’
‘Oh, he just looked the type to me. That’s all. Quit asking me questions, man.’
Dad walked over to her and looked into her eyes. ‘No, Alex, there’s more to this than you’re letting on. Come on, please tell me.’
As unbelievable as it might’ve sounded I thought I saw tears in her eyes.
‘No, Dad, there’s no more to it. Please just leave me alone,’ and she ran upstairs.
‘Alex, please. I only want to talk to you. Please don’t shut me out,’ he said running into the hall. I followed.
‘Please just leave me alone, for God’s sakes. I don’t need this, alright. Just bugger off the whole lot of you,’ Alex shouted from her bedroom.
Dad has his head against her door. He tried the handle but it was locked.
‘Dad, she’ll come out when she’s ready. Maybe we should just leave her for now,’ I said.
I couldn’t believe I was supporting her but I hadn’t seen her cry since she was a
little girl. I had never seen such a transformation, not in Alex. It was like seeing Anna Nicole Smith transform into The Pope. It just didn’t happen.
‘No, I want to know why she said it.’
‘But, Dad, you know what she’s like. She doesn’t open up to anyone and she certainly won’t tell you until she’s ready.’
So we sat outside her room for a while until we heard her turn the doorknob.
‘Okay, you can come in now. I know you’ve been sitting out there.’
We stood up and went inside.
‘So what do you want to know?’ Alex said sitting down on her bed.
It had been a while since I had been invited into her room. It looked like any normal teenage girl’s room (excluding mine) with posters of tanned and muscle-clad boys. She seemed to have a thing for guys with messy blond hair and brown glistening muscles.
Her room was messy and covered in magazines and makeup. I had no idea how she could let her bed go unmade. Even her Venetian blind wasn’t sitting straight. I didn’t know how she survived in that room.
Her eyes were red.
Could she have been crying?
I stood by the door with my arms crossed and watched Dad sit next to her on the bed.
‘I just want to know why you think Stan is a dirty old pervert.’
She breathed in deeply and looked at the ceiling.
‘Well, he um – he just flirted with me a bit when I was little, that’s all.’
‘He flirted with you? What exactly did he do, Alex? I need to know. Please tell me.’
‘That’s all, really.’
‘Come on, Alex. What did he say? Did he touch you in anyway?’
‘I was a little kid for God’s sakes. How am I going to remember that?’
That was just it. Nothing ever really left our minds, our hearts or our lives. Even if we were blind to them they were always there burning inside us. One of my favourite sayings is from a 1958 film called World Dies Screaming (also known as Terror in the Haunted House). It goes like this:
You hold the answer deep within your own mind.
Consciously, you've forgotten it.
That's the way the human mind works.
Whenever something is too unpleasant, too shameful for us
to entertain, we reject it.
We erase it from our memories.
But the imprint is always there."
I especially liked the last two lines. I imagined our mind a dark chamber full of thoughts running around like free spirits. The bad memories we push deep down into pitch-black crevices hoping they’ll disappear, but they wait there quietly until one day something or someone sets them free.
‘Alex, you would remember something like that,’ Dad said.
‘I can’t remember what he did, okay. Please just give it a rest.’
Her eyes were watery again.
It was a new thing.
Dad needed to approach her differently. Alex, although she was selfish, liked to believe she was independent and didn’t need help from anyone.
So I sat beside her and said, ‘Alex, it’s not that we’re trying to help you. We need to know because Stan has already raped Sam. We need to know how long it’s been going on for and how many people he’s done it to. I’m sure you want to see him punished just as much as we do.’
‘You know I’d love to see Stan punished, but –’ Alex paused.
‘But what, Alex? He can’t get away with what he’s done. It’s wrong and you know it too,’ I said.
‘For God’s sakes, Keisha, what is it you want me to say?’
‘I want you to tell us what happened.’
She paused before saying, ‘he wanted me to touch him, okay. Is that what you want to hear? That he used to get me to touch his thing? I was six. Sam was pregnant so that’s why he went for me. He said it was a special snake and that if I touched it, it would grow. So I did.’
Dad looked as shocked as I felt.
‘I feel so bad,’ she said over and over as tears rolled down her cheeks.
‘Why do you feel bad? You shouldn’t feel bad at all. You didn’t know what you were doing,’ Dad said. He put his arms around her and cried.
‘But – but at the time I – I thought it was fun watching the snake grow.’ Alex shuddered.
Dad put his head up, grit his teeth and said, ‘God, if only I could get my hands on that man again. This time I’d really kill him.’
Alex looked up at him. ‘No. No, Dad. You mustn’t. He warned me never to tell anyone. Please, please don’t.’
For the first time in my life I felt such empathy for her. Even though she was a spy from Mars she didn’t deserve this.
‘Well, you’re a bit older now, Alex. I think you understand it all. Can I ask you something? Did he ever penetrate you?’ Dad asked.
‘No – no, me touching him, that’s the furthest it ever went. Please, Dad. Please don’t say anything.’
‘Why, Alex?’
‘Because he said if I ever told anyone, however old I was, something bad would happen to me and my sisters.’
He pulled her closer and hugged her tight.
‘You poor child. I jut wish I knew all this was going on. That son of a bitch has ruined another daughter. How long did he do it for?’
‘It – it was for a while, perhaps a couple of years, but in the end I worked out what he was doing, and I threatened to tell you. That’s when he said something bad would happen to us.’
Dad’s tics were taking over his mouth.
He had half-moon dents in his lower lip.
‘That’s it. That man is going to jail for life. If it takes me until the day I die, I will see he is put in for life. He is not doing that to my daughters and getting away with it.’
He called Jessica from downstairs.
She came in too quickly for my liking.
‘Yes, Dad?’ she said coming in.
‘Jessica, I don’t know how to ask you this, but has Stan ever touched you or done anything you were uncomfortable with?’
‘No – no, he hasn’t. Definitely not. Why do you ask?’ She frowned but I knew she knew why.
‘Because he has done it to Alex as well, and I need to know if he’s touched anyone else in the family.’
‘Dad, he didn’t touch me. He just got me to touch him,’ Alex said.
‘No, he did absolutely nothing to me,’ Jessi said.
Then he looked at me and said, ‘I’d know if he had done anything to you, Keisha. I’m sure you would’ve told me.’
‘No, he’s never done anything to me. I was as shocked as you were about Alex,’ I said.
‘That swine saw Alex as an easy target because she was young. The nerve of the man,’ Dad said and yawned.
‘He deserves to be locked up,’ Jessi said.
‘Come on, I think we all should get some sleep now so we can go and see Sam tomorrow. The hospital said they’d call if anything happened so I’ll take the cordless to bed with me. Are you going to be okay, Alex, or do you want to sit up for a while with me?’
She shook her head, said ‘no, I’ll be fine’ and wiped her face.
I had many thoughts running through my head that night.
Poor Sam in hospital.
Poor Alex being abused.
Poor Dad for not knowing all this was happening to his daughters.
And lucky me
*****