DIARY OF A COFFIN DODGER CHAPTER D

Chapter D

A shadow slipped through the rustling, moon-light dappled leaves of a Moreton Bay Fig Tree. The shadow ceased moving as a possum sat still on a branch, alarmed by the sound of crunching ashes.

A fox scuffled through piles of cinders while sniffing around the edges of a rusty corrugated iron sheet lying buckled on blackened ground. The fox lifted its head and froze as the stench of cigarette smoke drifted its way.

A mouse scurried out from underneath the iron sheet.

An owl began a silent, lethal glide.

The owl changed course as a glowing cigarette moved below the shadowy branches of the Moreton Bay Fig.

Two watchful figures, dressed in dark clothing, with cloth caps pulled low over their faces, sidled out from underneath the tree. Their shadows slithered into the moon's gentle, restful light flowing over the tyre-track scarred ground between the tree and an ash blighted site.

The owl flew across the site where death had left its mark and headed towards the crossbeams of a pole.

The fox bolted towards the shadowy hole of an unmarked grave, one of several a hundred yards away from a broken kerosene lamp lying beside a sooty brick.

Harsh voices ruptured the stillness of the night's chilly air as the possum scurried into a tree hollow.

The glowing cigarette fell to the ground as the figures drew closer to the blackened shells of two vehicles.

'Two weeks since the fire, Bill, and any talk of what caused it?'

'Have heard nothin' since I've been away.'

A rusty wheel hub screeched as it scrapped against a jumbled heap of ash smeared bricks. A blackened shell swayed in the moonlight.

Bill's voice snarled,

'Look at me bloody hand from touching that vehicle. Covered in soot. A joy to drive that Riley Pathfinder. I'll kill the cunts who did this to it and the Holden. But I'll torture the bastards first for what they did to Mick.'

'What are you saying, Bill? That someone started it?’

'For sure. The bitch we were with, a good fuck, a real good fuck, was acting strange that night. When Mick started nodding off, I wondered if she had done something to our drinks. I wasn't feeling the best myself.'

'But when smoke swirled into the room, I had no bloody doubts. That bitch moved out of the room, steady as a rock. But I was as unsteady as a dunny in a gale as I followed the slut out.'

'I was right behind her, about to grab her round her lying bitch's throat and choke the friggin' life out of her when I tripped and sprained me fuckin' ankle.'

'While crawling out of that bloody mess, flames, and shit were falling like confetti at a wedding. Jesus Christ! It was a near fucking’ thing.’

'Didn't hang around for the cops, eh?' A chuckle drifted across the site.

'Not on your fucking life. I just kept crawling away.'

'Do you reckon the bitch had help?'

'I'd bet my life on it. Typical slut. No brains. Couldn't have done something like that without help.'

'Have to be a woman, though. You know where you are with blokes. They're up front with what's happening. Women are sly and devious. Real snakes in the grass.'

'Any ideas who?'

'Got some. My sister, Clare, shares a house up on the North Coast with one of the nurses from here. I’ve asked her to dig around; I’ll chew over what she finds out and take it from there. The nurse is a good lookin' sort. Keeps her legs shut, though. A real ice maiden.'

'You're lucky, Bill, that you've found a woman you can trust. The ones I've met, their trust goes only so far as my money lasts.'

'0h! Yer! Clare and I trust each other. We are close, real bloody close, have been since we were kids.'

A match flared, and a cigarette glowed as the figures slunk through the site. They stopped at the far end as moonlight cast a long mournful shadow along the length of a cold, green enamel bathtub.

'What a fucking awful way to go, eh? Trapped underneath a bloody bathtub. One day soon, I'll fix those bitches.'

Cigarette smoke spiralled towards the heavens, where a shooting star's flickering demise darted across the star-spangled sky.

'Come on. I've seen enough. Let's piss off.'

The glowing cigarette moved along the edge of the site.

Gliding down from a pole, an owl extended its deadly talons while the cigarette arced to the ground.

The fox looked out from its hole as a rat squealed and the two figures disappeared beneath the shadows of the Moreton Bay Fig.

The rodent lay still in the owl's talons as the bird took flight.

It flew over the rusty frame of an upturned bed as a possum climbed out of a hollow in the tree and crawled along the moon-light mottled branches.

A different sort of night lay over a farmhouse on the North Coast. Different to the moonlit one when Bill and his mate surveyed the remains of the condemned asylum ward.

A wild cloud strewn darkness about a week after those two blokes toured the site of the fire.

Bursts of rain hammered the corrugated iron roof of the farmhouse as the wind howled down the lounge room chimney. The wind stirred the red-orange flames in the room's grate into a dancing whirl, creating disjointed, wraithlike shadows that leapt high along the cream coloured walls.

A week in which I left the asylum and travelled for hours and hours, both physically and mentally, after I started my journey to the North Coast of New South Wales.

Though the physical journey was ending, the mental journey continued as Anne and I left the station and Anne drove the open-topped bright red Buggy home.

Several miles from the station, the Buggy's moving shadow flitted from fence post to fence post as Anne drove along the track that ran beside the farm's eastern boundary fence.

I watched black pendulous clouds smother the last rays of the setting sun as the clouds deployed across the sky as we entered the driveway. 

The drive extended beyond the house, leading into the backyard where the garage was positioned, a few yards distant from the backdoor.

A massive blackberry bush grew alongside the eastern wall of the rather dilapidated wooden building. The interior of which reverberated with the sound of the Vee-Dub engine as Anne drove the Buggy into the open garage. 

I discovered the garage doors resting against the garage’s interior rear wall the day after I moved in. I left them there, as I saw no point in putting them back into position at the front of the garage.

As Anne switched off the ignition and applied the handbrake, an icy wind blasted leaves and bark into ragged heaps along the western wall of the garage.  

With the Buggy parked, we both stepped out of the vehicle.

Anne made her way out of the garage as I fetched my battered leather suitcase from the back of the vehicle.

I carried the case in my hand as I joined Anne outside the garage.

We hurried our footsteps to the house as cold splodges of rain heralded an approaching deluge.

When we were half-way between the garage and the house, the deluge announced its arrival.

The rain pounded on the corrugated iron roof of the garage and the wooden walled woodshed extending out from the back wall of the garage.

A deluge that also pounded on the corrugated iron woodshed door. Its rusty hinges creaked as the loop of wire latching the door to a nail in the shed wall flexed under the force of the winds and the driving rain.     

The deluge hit the house as Anne reached the back door and pushed it open. I entered the house behind her and shut the door as the rain drummed on the roof.

As Anne tended to the fire in the Everhot fuel stove in the kitchen, I took the suitcase to my room and set it on the bed. I went from my room to the lounge to start a fire in the grate and then joined Anne in the kitchen.

Anne and I were now sitting in the big comfortable armchairs in the lounge room.

An hour ago, we had consumed a home-cooked evening meal while sitting around the red cedar table in the kitchen. A repast that had more flavour than the two meat pies with sauce I bought from a milk bar at Central Station.

Throughout that journey from Central, I had the delight of a first-class compartment to myself.

Therefore, I did not have to contend with men running their eyes over my physicality or starting intrusive, unsought conversations. It baffles me why men can’t keep quiet around a woman who is by herself.

I enjoyed eating the pies. I am sure my relaxed mood enhanced their flavour while sitting in a space without the presence of men.

Content with my own thoughts, I watched the countryside slip by as the train rattled and swayed on its northward journey from Sydney.

In the farmhouse, after dinner, the chairs Anne and I were sitting in were similar in style to ones in scenes in black and white movies.

Like, the murder mysteries that I enjoy watching.

Say, the ones set in the 1930s, where a body lies on a blood stained carpet amidst the plush furnishings of a living room in an English country house.

I held a foolscap sized notebook in my hand as I sat in my armchair. I looked up from reading it and turned towards Anne.

'Clare writes about her brother Bill and his mate's tour of the fire site with considerable flair, doesn't she?'

Anne looked up from a newspaper.

'Almost as good as the articles I am reading in this paper.' Anne's face twisted into a grimace. 'I found Clare's narrative, however, not only colourful but shocking and hurtful.'

'Yer, it's ugly all right, really revolting stuff,' I replied. 'Were you aware Bill was close behind you?'

'Nah!' Anne's newspaper paper rustled as she folded it and placed it on the glass topped occasional table beside her chair.

'I focused on getting through the side entrance to the building where the door was open and the plywood sheeting was missing.'

'I was going like a bat out of hell. The speed with which those flames took off frightened the bejusus out of me.'

'You had an absolute shocker of an evening.' I looked at Anne with concern as the clock on the stone mantlepiece above the grate chimed the hour.

'Yer, but we knew the risks I was taking.' Anne shrugged.

'Bill's a nasty piece of work, isn't he?' I continued. 'He didn’t help his mate, Mick, escape the fire. Bill's focus was doing you in. What a fucked up individual, Anne!'

'Yer! But it gets worse. You've read the passages where Clare talks about her relationship with her brother?'

I nodded as a moth flew into the glowing stained glass lamp shade at the centre of the room's pressed metal ceiling.

'The accounts are disturbing. There is something unhealthy about them, yer?'

'I agree.' Anne looked at me. 'I'd say we're on the same wavelength in our thinking about it.'

She turned and looked at the fire.

I did the same as we both fell silent.

I stared into the glowing coals of the fire as another burst of rain drummed on the roof.

As the burst eased off, water gurgled along the roof gutters.

Water that poured into the rusty fresh water tanks at the side of the house and gushed out of the overflow pipe. The cascading stream of water created a pool at the base of the timber stand on which the tanks stood.

The next day, sunlight sparkled on the rippling waves of the pool as I watched Australian Mynas and Eastern Rosellas bathing and fluffing their feathers.

But for now, the fire crackled in the lounge-room grate. The shadows created by the fire of Anne and I lolled on the walls and, somewhere out in the howling desolate darkness, an animal bellowed.

A chilly wind rattled the double-hung windows of the room as Anne yawned.

She stood up and said,

'Anyway, that's me done for the day. I'm buggered.'

'As you continue reading, you’ll see that it’s not just us facing danger. So are Samantha and Jane. I suggest we talk to them as soon as they get back from the music festival at Byron Bay. Let's talk about that over breakfast tomorrow after you've read those passages.'

'There's time to think about what to do. Clare gets back from the revivalist retreat at Bluey's Beach a couple of days after Samantha and Jane arrive home.'

I nodded.

‘In a night as wild as this,’ Anne said, facing the windows, ‘it’s comforting to be snug in bed. Good... Oh! Shit! The spotlight's back!'

'What!'

Rising from my chair, I placed Clare’s journal on the round wooden table in the middle of the room.

Anne and I strode across the soft green and white patterned carpet to the windows and peered out.

'Now that's weird. Hunters go shooting on clear nights. I've never seen hunters out on a night like this, waving a spotlight about,' I said.

Anne and I watched a powerful beam of light shine across the paddocks a couple of hundred yards away from the front of the house.

'I hate it when the beam shines on the house. It freaks me out,' Anne replied.

We watched a vehicle’s tail lights move away from the house towards the dam in the back paddock of the farm. The vehicle's progress marked by the restless beam of a spotlight as it roamed a wide arc of ground to the sides and the front of the vehicle.

'Fucking arseholes. Anyway, goodnight. Fingers crossed, they won't be back.'

I called 'goodnight,' as I drew the curtains across the windows and Anne strolled out of the room.

Leaving the journal on the table, I walked through the house, drawing curtains over the windows.

After securing the front door, I proceeded to the back door. While checking it, I jumped back, startled.

A large brown huntsman spider scurried across the door, just inches from where my hand had been.

I relaxed as the spider slipped into the crevice between the door and wall. However, my feeling of calm was disrupted by a loud, recurring noise from the backyard.

A banging sound. A sound as loud as hail belting the unlined corrugated iron roof of the front verandah. The sound I focused on was coming from the unlatched woodshed door.

I hesitated, considering stepping out into the wild night to secure the door.

I thought, 'Strange! I didn't hear the door banging when Anne and I walked to the house. Maybe the wind is wilder than I imagined.' I shrugged my shoulders. 'But nah! Leave the door; with any luck, the storm will end by morning. I can sort out the door then.'

Having secured the back door, I made my way back through the house to the lounge room.

While the tenacious banging of the woodshed door added its drama to this moonless night's wailing wind and driving rain, a vehicle crawling towards the woodshed added another.

On the far side of the woodshed from the house, only the vehicle’s tail and parking lights showed as it moved along a muddy track.

The lights went off when the vehicle stopped as a cigarette glowed in the dark interior of the Holden, on the driver’s side of the front bench seat.

I don't know whether it was after I checked the doors or before I completed those tasks that the car parked behind the woodshed. Or whether it was before or after I entered the lounge-room that a figure slunk out of the garage. Or what I would have done if I had known. But I knew how to put wood on the fire.

Which I did after I entered the lounge room and took a couple of pieces of split she-oak timber from the wood box. The lidless dark blue metal, wood box stood a few feet away from the grate, below one end of the mantlepiece.

After I put the wood on the fire, I stood in front of it, warming my hands, and cursed pervy blokes.

Who either scanned a blazing spotlight through the windows, unsettling the house's night time tranquility. A beam that sent scary, grasping shadows jumping out of corners and up along the walls.

Or their utes paid us a visit on Saturday mornings.

Mornings when dawn's warm rays shooed the last of the night-time shadows from the house and a clear sky presaged a rain free weekend.

As the vehicles approached the house, they drove fast along a dirt road. The unpaved road that ran past the house on the other side of the front fence.

Crammed into the back of an ute, amongst dogs, and camping gear were blokes.

Boofy blokes who stood up and yelled, 'we've come to check out the chicks!' while the vehicle slowed down as it drove past the house.

Raucous laughter accompanied the chucking of scrunched up beer cans at the house as the engine revved up. Clouds of choking dust drifted towards the house as the blokes sat down and the ute sped away.

It never made for a comfortable morning as I and my housemates, Jane, Samantha, and Clare, sat on the edge of the front verandah drinking cups of tea. The thought of the ute stopping at the front gate and the blokes piling out scared us shitless.

On those Saturday mornings, reflections on the beauty that lay around and above the farmhouse suffered a blow, replaced by anxieties, clanging rhythms.

Beauty like rose-pink fluffy clouds strolling across the heart-aching-blue dome of the sky and Pied Currawongs caroling from the trees beside the house. Or the piping call of a Pied Butcher Bird and the aromas that ambled out from the flowers of the grevillea and banksia plants growing in the front yard.

Yellow and red blossoms swaying in a cool, soothing breeze as brown and yellow thornbills and bright blue wrens chirped and hopped their way around the flowers.

Thoughts of the beautiful things in life, however, that were difficult to conjure up while I gazed into the fire as my mind buzzed with other concerns.

After I took a deep breath, I turned away from the fire and returned to my seat. I sat down and looked towards the journal on the table. I thought about the relationship between Bill and Clare.

In Sydney, while working at the asylum, I belonged to an all women's theatre group where men were barred from attending rehearsals or performances of our plays.

We were developing skills to separate us from the need to call on the skill-sets of men and the male-centric approval/disapproval dichotomy that men impose on women.

The relationships that group members had outside the group and its activities were their business. We were not excluding men from every aspect of our lives.

Two members felt empowered by the camaraderie of the group and its activities. They discussed their experience of incestuous relationships with male members of their families.

Their anger was palpable, and the relationships they described reeked of twisted toxic power imbalances.

Imbalances that resonated with me because of my father's sexual abuse of me and my two younger sisters.

An abuse that only ended when I and my sisters, as teenagers, left the family home.

Abuse that went to another level when my father prostituted us out as children to churchmen who made sizeable donations to the church where my father preached.

I've dealt with those bastards, those men, though. The photos I sent to those blokes' wives ended marriages and contact with all family members.

My father, however, has disappeared, despite the efforts of my sisters and I to keep track of him as he moved from parish to parish.

However, my search continues. Someday, I will find that slimy prick and deal with him.

I resisted the siren calls of suicide following those ugly, acidic life events. Optimism's glowing lamp kept me going despite my father's abuse.

A light of hope shining in my life by the inspiration given to the world through the life of Mary and Joseph, the parents of Jesus.

Those lives took an unforeseen turn when Mary had non-consensual sex with an unknown perpetrator.

The extant records of that shocking event are corrupted and now give a romantic and theological slant to Mary's gut-wrenching ordeal. But rape is rape and to airbrush it in any way is disgusting and trivialises the male centric-brutality that women and girls contend with daily.

Non-consensual, because coercion forced Mary to open her legs.

The fear of the God of her faith tradition if she did not comply with the enablers, the Archangel Gabriel's, demand. Fear of a vengeful God, whose wrath manifested as devastating floods and plagues on those who disobeyed Him.

Whether Jesus was the child of that rape or whether he was one of Mary's later children, who now knows?

But what is known is that Mary saw the pregnancy through despite the social opprobrium attached to it. And, despite the loss of his social standing within his community and losing his business, Joseph stayed with Mary. A miracle beyond words.

He did not react with violence, as blokes, by default, do. Instead, he responded with compassion. He cared for Mary and her child.

There is hope for us all when blokes respond to that call of the God of that faith tradition and undergo a similar miraculous pivot in all their relationships with women and girls.

Joseph's life signalled a dawning that grows towards a better day. An expectant transformation that keeps me going despite the shit that life chucks my way.

But the shit that came my way when I worked at the asylum in Sydney pushed that better day further and further away.

Rampant misogynistic shit.

The usual male stuff. Ingrained, habitual, and exaggerated to gain kudos from other blokes.

Stuff like the undressing of women with their eyes. Or speaking to a woman's chest and not her face or speaking over her or interrupting her if a woman was talking.

As well as the nasty blah, blah, blah male-centric comments about a woman's appearance or her physicality. The usual spiritually depleting crap men dish out to women and girls gratis on a minute by minute, hour by hour basis.

At the asylum, blokes hiked this depersonalisation to another level.

We did the run-of-the-mill stuff, like scanning a car park for random blokes before going to our vehicles at the end of a shift. But also, we had to monitor the groups of male nurses striding behind us as we walked around the asylum's grounds. To ensure they did not get too close.

Otherwise, chilling chuckles blighted the day as a brutal hand slid underneath a female nurse's blue uniform. A hand that shocked and violated as it squeezed a woman’s genitals.

The hand pulled back while a male voice giggled and remarked, ‘Second one today, eh?’ to mates on either side of the gutless perpetrator.

'Goosing' was the name the male nurses gave to this hideous practice.

'Perverted bastard!' Was what I said when it happened to me as I turned and glared at the smirking male nurse's face behind me before spitting on his dial. I dared him to smack me one, as he drew back his fist, but his male nurse mates dragged him away.

Male nurses who had no qualms about bedding down with a female nurse on the standard twelve hour asylum night shift.

Though creepy handsy male nurses tried it on with me several times, when we worked a night shift together, a venomous,

'Fuck off! Before I speak with any woman who associates with you and your sad little life. I'll tell them you'd screw the cunt of a dog if you had the brains to figure out how to do it.'

Meant they kept their distance.

Except for one bloke who needed a kick in the nuts before he got the message.

According to the asylum grapevine, a couple of middle-aged, pot-bellied, male nurses who worked in the asylum's administration office of a night were notorious for this predatory practice.

The woman may have been their partner at the time or a female inmate from Ward 12, a Female Adolescent Ward.

A younger female induced to have sex with these scumbags by the handing out of valium tablets filched from pharmacy stocks.

Or the promise to keep these younger women's names off the ECT list.

The list of forty-five inmates who sat, waiting, on a Tuesday or a Thursday, in the long corridor leading to a spacious room in Ward Seven, the Admission Ward.

Leaning against the wall opposite to the watchful, nervous line of inmates were several male nurses, with keys hanging from glistening silver chains attached to the belts of their grey trousers.

The nurses smoked cigarettes, smirked and laughed amongst themselves.

In their free hands, they clutched the leather handle of an open canvass bag.

A circled ward number was printed in black ink on the sides of the bag. The bags held inmates' files. The only time male nurses had anything to do with those documents.

The fittings of the spacious room at the end of that corridor in Ward 7 included beds with linen and small, square, wheeled stainless steel trolleys.

On the cloth covered top of the trolleys were rows of syringes and medical equipment. Vials of chemicals, rolls of bandages and Elastoplast, and boxes of tablets, cotton wool balls and swabs completed the assortment of necessities for the ECT procedure. These necessities spread from the top and over the lower shelves of the trolleys.

The polished lino floor of the room reflected the harsh light from glowing neon tubes stretched across the ceiling as the venetian blinds over the room's windows were closed.

A room where male and female nurses stood beside beds.

A room where doctors maneuvered ECT machines on wheeled stainless steel trolleys to the head of a bed. With the machine in position, a doctor sat on a stool with a set of electrodes dangling from his hand.

Both I and Anne attempted to talk with the teenager inmates in Ward 12. A confidential woman to woman conversation about encounters with male nursing staff. However, the young women's fears were palpable. They either changed the topic or they walked away.

I assume the thought of speaking out and its consequences clanged the chains of a hideous repressive logic. Consequences like hours spent in solitary confinement in a Single Room or their names placed on the ECT list.

The grapevine amongst female nurses also flagged the predatory behaviour of male nurses working day shifts.

Like the Charge Nurse of the Male Handicapped Ward, Ward 8. 

He set up a bed in a room in a lower section of the ward for his liaisons with younger female nurses during his working hours.

Or the Charge Nurse of the Short-Stay Admission Ward, Ward 11, who had photos of semi-naked pre-teen children pinned to the back of his office door.

A guy who discussed with other male nurses how to drill holes in the bathroom door of the family home. An act he had accomplished to perve on his daughters when they were in the shower.

Or the male nurses who preferred the privacy of a panel van for a liaison with a female, nurse, or inmate during a lunch break.

Flagrant gross behaviours that were given impetus by a lack of accountability.

After five years of working in the asylum, nurses became members of the New South Wales Government Public Service. These were permanent appointments.

Employment, that is, until misconduct. Assault, of any description, was not considered misconduct for the purposes of the employment contract.

While thinking about the nastiness of men, I wondered as to the identity of the bloke who visited the site of the fire with Bill.

I therefore returned to Clare's room and continued Anne's search.

Turning on the light, I rummaged through the dressing table drawers where Anne found the journal I had been reading.

There were several similar journals in different drawers of the dresser.

I thought it was odd Clare had numbered each journal in large Roman Numerals on the inside front cover. I shrugged as I finished looking at the journals and put them back in sequence according to that numbering.

As I discovered later, that was an error.

At the bottom of one drawer was a photograph of three people.

I recognised the person at the centre of the photo as Clare. The bloke standing to her right, though I didn't twig at the time, was a guy I saw decades later.

He walked past my table while having a meal at Macca's. A meal I had started eating after getting new tyres put on my car at a tyre workshop with a puke yellow door frame marking its entrance.

A bloke I recognised as I looked at the photo as a male nurse from the asylum with the name 'Bill.'

I didn't recognise the bloke to Clare's left.

Startled, I looked up at the sound of a motor vehicle approaching the house. I returned the photo, closed the drawer, then turned off the light. Leaving the room, I ran to the lounge; a car was speeding toward the house.

I picked up the torch from the round wooden table and put out the lights.

I flicked on the torch and strode towards Anne's room.

However, I met her coming out of her room as the beam from a car's headlights blazed through the lounge room curtains.