DISCARDED DRAFT DIARY OF A COFFIN DODGER CHAPTER H (DRAFT)

DRAFT

MEN TELLING LIES ------ THE SEARCH FOR SISTER TAMAR

In a conflicted mood, I strode along the southern boundary of the Reverend's property, my way lit by the flashing party lights of first responders' vehicles.

A mood, though lifting, that echoed with sentiments in a letter from my eldest sister I read before the first Guy Fawkes Night after the Reverend Sadistic Bastard's funeral.

A letter I chewed over while I marched towards a group of ambulances, as a concoction of feelings, anger, and elation powered my steps.

Pissed-off and hoarse from angry shouts at the fire officers, my spirits lifted as, well before I walked towards the ambulances, I stood in the back paddock, grinning from ear to ear.

Through gaps in clouds of billowing smoke, I watched a mob break through the front section of the southern boundary fence and surge towards the Reverend’s sanctuary of Sin.

Though a Tactical Response Squad had now dispersed the mob, the breach created by this crowd left a space for the ambos to park their wheels away from vehicles criss-crossing the garden bed on the south side of the house.

The letter from my sister arrived at my place a couple of months before that Guy Fawkes Night when I reached an ambulance and asked a paramedic to have a look at my throat. It felt sore from cursing the fire officers and irritated by fumes and smoke from the bonfire.

That letter mirrored the rage I felt towards the fire officers battling the blaze that consumed the vegetation of the back paddock and the adjoining fields.

The letter expressed my three sisters' anger at the damage I did to the Reverend’s property.

I perused the letter about a week after I smashed the southern section of the Reverend’s front fence to smithereens, ploughed through the rose garden and chucked doughies across the backyard.

My three sisters had returned to the Reverend’s house to continue sorting through his effects a couple of days after they left the house while I stayed on the Reverend's property, sitting in his shed of sexual sewerage reading his sermon on The Magnificat.

The shock at discovering the damage to the property, according to the letter writer, ‘…went beyond words….’   

Following my stellar production of gas at the wake and then this '... vandalisation…with your fingerprints over it…,' the three sisters decided, according to the letter writer, to keep me at a distance.

I felt chuffed at the assumption I had damaged the property.

The sisters did not blame a vigilante bent on revenge for the Reverend’s sexual exploitation of children. Ghastly acts that received wide publicity across media outlets after law enforcement officers raided the motel room where the Reverend died and a young naked girl sat on the edge of a bed.

The type-written letter signed by my eldest sister claimed to be speaking for herself and my two youngest sisters.

I had a fourth sister, Tamar, who dropped off the family's radar several months after my brothers had stopped talking to any family members, years before the Reverend S.B. departed this life to discover whatever the other side had in store for him.

This chapter narrates my search for Tamar, and the reasons the Reverend S.B.'s family lost contact with her.

I guess my three sisters wanted me to drop off their radar. According to the letter, I must only communicate with them via my eldest sister and only by letter.

The letter also spelled out what my three sisters intended my role to be in the disposal of the Reverend’s effects.

I had no problem following the communication rules stipulated in the first part of the letter. I considered my sisters to be enablers of the Reverend’s paedophilia and looked forward to ceasing contact with them once a solicitor had finished tidying up legal matters relating to the Reverend’s estate.

However, over the decades prior to the Reverend’s demise, I kept within the three sisters’ orbit. On occasions, initiating contact with them.

We had catch-up meetings at various coffee shops across London. The three sisters met me as a group and regaled me with narratives of their monthly visits to see the Reverend S.B. at his house, as well as visits at Christmas and on his birthday.

They also recounted stories of chilling birthday celebrations at the Reverend's house for their daughters where '.... darling daddy...' gave the young daughters presents of frilly nighties and lace trimmed panties.

And without elaboration, the sisters informed me the Reverend had given their daughters their first training bras. Bought from Harrods.

The monthly visits were on a Sunday.

After attending a morning service with their families at a mainstream Protestant church where ‘…dear, Christ blessed daddy…’ (my eldest sister’s words) preached the sermon, the three sisters and their families returned to the Reverend’s house (the one I failed to turn into a Guy Fawkes Night apocalypse worthy of Hollywood) to share a roast dinner with him.

I wondered, while my sisters chatted during our catch-up meetings at a coffee shop, if the housekeeper undertook another role for the Reverend.

A suspicion given sustenance after the death of the Reverend when the housekeeper disappeared. News media reported the police had issued an international arrest warrant for her, with Interpol joining the hunt.

However, any detailed information about the housekeeper beyond her housekeeping role remained a matter for my three sisters and law enforcement officers. I took no interest in the matter.

During the catch-up meetings with me, the housekeeper, according to my sisters' narration, remained a background figure, the stereotypical housekeeper from a hundred English novels.

At these meetings, I scrutinised my three sisters’ conversations. I was looking for legal pavement stones to build a road to march the Reverend S.B. along into court to face charges relating to his many sex crimes targeting children.

In a legal and law enforcement system dominated by the interests of men, to have a man charged with a crime in which a bloke lived out sexual scenarios from the prurient male fantasy world, as media reports of rape trials made clear, is a tricky trek littered with misogynistic pitfalls.

To start that journey meant having the legal materials assembled and ready to bridge those snares. A statement from me alone regarding the Reverend's sexual exploitation of me and my siblings lacked the power to clear the front desk of a police station. For lift-off to occur, I needed a metaphorical Exocet Missile, loaded with evidence, if I was to punch holes in that shared male fantasy world.

A heterosexual male fantasy world. A world given implicit encouragement by legal and law enforcement systems designed to protect its beating strength, the sexual exploitation of women and girls.

After all, the only barrier impeding men’s sexual exploitation of girls is the age of consent.

Perversely therefore,Therefore, the Reverend and his ilk are regarded by men as having the derring-do of explorers of a previous time and age, by living out this wish fulfilment of heterosexual men by crossing that barrier. The Reverend and his ilk are secretly feted by men in the dark corners of their souls and their exploits admired for their courage to sail into the seas of sexual exploitation of underage females.

Therefore, in grudging admiration of these men’s courage, any female who dares challenge these gallant explorers in court and expose their journeys for what they are, faces a fusillade of misogyny. A cannonade designed to shred her credibility and widen the spiritual and psychological wounds caused by the abuse so that the searing lacerations never heal. After all, the bitch needs to be taught a lesson for daring to shine a light on the deathly grey mucous cesspit in which heterosexual men sail their wank fuelled craft of sexual fantasy.

Though the Reverend's predilection was for girls, I wondered, as I thought about legal cases like that of Oscar Wilde’s, if an the road to a court appearance would be a super highway if the Reverend’s sexual preference involved young boys.

However, my winnowing of my sister’s conversations about their meetings and conversations with the Reverend brought no glimmer of gold in having the Reverend prosecuted.

My eldest sister introduced that section by stating that she and the two younger sisters, as they had sorted through the Reverend’s belongings, and their families had decided on an overseas trip ‘…as a break from the stress and sadness of their dear father’s death…’

And good-luck to them, I thought.

I paid no attention to the places they intended visiting. I paid attention, however, to the time of their expected return: December in time to spend Christmas in the United Kingdom.

I had time to plan and implement my stress relief. A relief not related to sadness over the Reverend’s death but gladness that, though his behaviour went unchallenged in the legal system, his sexual exploitation of children had ended.

Plans that started about six weeks before the first Guy Fawkes Night after the Reverend’s funeral, when, according to my sister’s letter, the three sisters and their families intended flying out of the United Kingdom.

And they left. I travelled to Heathrow Airport and did not make myself known to them as I stood in a crowd of people and watched they and their families walk through the departure gate heading off to I didn’t care where.

I then drove to the Reverend’s palace of filth to carry out the second part of the instructions set out in the letter but not in the way my eldest sister intended.

The letter instructed me to take the items the sisters did not want to a charity shop. The sisters stacked these items on the grass near the back steps to the house.

I assumed they wanted to piss me off. Strike back at me for making their saintly father's funeral memorable, but not in a good way, and for the damage to his property. A pile of stuff on the grass in the Reverend's former backyard presented a logistical nightmare to remove from the property. However, the position of the items suited my plans for building a bonfire.

They were the only ones of my siblings who kept in regular contact with him.

I only kept in contact with my sisters as a means of keeping tabs on the Reverend S.B. As they had kept in regular contact with him, I had hoped that in my conversations with them, they may say something that could help build a case to have the Reverend S.B. arrainged before a judge. In a legal system dominated by men, to have a man charged with the crime of living out a male fantasy world, as the newspaper reports of rape trials made clear, a man charged in a court suyor living out a male fantasy world in a legal system dominated by men

My sisters were appalled by the damage I had caused to the fence and the garden. They looked at me suspiciously when they saw the tire tracks on the back paddocks as they knew of my skill at chucking doughies. I had written to them when I was in Australia on my first visit, years before the Reverend's funeral, bragging about the skills I had learnt. Like how to use a chainsaw and how to chuck the perfect doughy.

The shed was creaking by the time I had finished walking through it with the chainsaw buzzing a couple of days before bonfire night. When I had finished sawing through the up-rights and stepped outside, I switched off the chain saw and placed it on the ground. and the shed was leaning in such a way that its full weight rested on the open door, which, as the door opened outwards, was jammed into the ground.

Therefore it did not take much effort from my SUV as it pulled the rope I had looped through the windows and out through the open doorway before tying it to the SUV's rear towing hook to topple the edifice. The shed's demise was so obviously imminent I had no need to engage AWD or the diff locks as I drove the SUV away from the shed. The rope I had looped through the shed's shattered windows and out through the open doorway before attaching the rope to the SUV's rear towing hook became taunt for only a couple of minutes before my vehicle sped up as the rope slackened and a thunderous sound, like a mighty thunderclap, accompanied the shed's collapse.

In a line stretching along the bench were a row of tall urns: one held brewed coffee, another hot water, and completing the row were two urns containing soup: chicken flavoured in one, tomato flavoured in the other.

Alongside the hot water urn were ceramic bowls containing either packets of white sugar, plastic stirrers, or tea bags. At the end of the row of bowls was a stack of white polystyrene cups. 

Though I had tried the soup on previous visits to the centre, the soup was not to my liking. It tasted like the generic-branded packets of instant soup I had bought at supermarkets.

Having put a donation into the tin, I poured myself a cup of coffee and poured milk into it from a carton I took and returned to the glass-fronted fridge at one end of the bench; I then walked through a side door out into the garden area running along one side of the centre.

I ambled across the grass to a bench in the far corner of the garden and sat down. 

I sipped the coffee and thought about a notice I had seen.

A notice board was inside the centre, to the left of the entrance doorway. There were notices either of people offering accommodation, people looking for accommodation, items for sale or people looking for work. However, the notice that caught my attention was a large notice offering work.

It wasn’t the only one offering work at a call centre. What stood out for me, though, was this call centre took crisis calls. Though not just any crisis. But those crises which are brought on by mental health issues.

As I sat on the bench in the garden of the drop-in centre sipping the coffee, I reflected on my awful experiences working in a call centre designed to deal with these crises during my visit to the land down under, the visit after the Reverend S.B.’s funeral.

This chapter will narrate that experience and my reflections on male violence and its expression in systems designed to care for people with mental health issues. And, if I feel like it, I will also write about the Bonfire Night at the Reverend S.B.’s former property when fire consumed his shed.

 As mental illness is incurable, I found it intriguing that the private sector, with its demands from shareholders for ever-increasing dividend payouts and its appeal to company executives for bonuses to support their fatuous, glittering lifestyles, could make a profit from a cluster of illnesses that would always be a drain on company profits. Of course, for the private sector, there was a solution. 

During my first visit to Australia, I worked on the telephone for a helpline run by a charity, offering support during mental health crises. There were no time limits to these calls. But the company behind the call centre had time limited the calls and therefore found a surefire way to turn human misery into rivers of gold.

This company would only accept applications from Registered Nurses.

I found that interesting because the salary and conditions of Registered Nurses working with the public sector award would have cut into the call-centre company’s profits. But of course, my salary at the call centre was not what it was meant to be according to that award. So I guess a sweetheart deal was in place between the nurses union and the company.

I learned about one such sweetheart deal during my first visit to Australia.

I was elected as a union delegate for the nurses union when I worked in a mental asylum in Sydney.  My curiosity about sweetheart deals between unions and employers was piqued when I examined the public and private healthcare awards for nurses. The nurses in the private sector, doing the same work as nurses in the public sector, were paid, both in terms of their hourly rate of pay and their shift penalties, less than nurses working in the public sector.

It all came down to a matter of numbers. That is the number of members each union had determined their clout at a political party conference, as I learned as a union delegate when I attended several of these conferences.

Initially, I was impressed by the number of nurses stated to be paid-up members of the nurse’s union. When I expressed my pleasure to a fellow union delegate, she told me about the sweetheart deal.

In return for the private hospital sector operating under a different nurses award than the one in the public sector, private hospital owners signed all the nurses in their employ to the nurses union. The sort of leverage the nurses union could not exercise with the public hospitals and their nurses working under a public sector award. The number of members gained by this leverage gave the nurses union at the party conference clout when it came to voting on policies at the party conference. However, this clout was not used to the advantage of the nurses union female membership. The nurses union used its votes to advance the interests of the misogynistic right wing of the party.  

Award conditions such as maternity leave or the right of female nurses to keep working after marriage were never discussed. The nurses union at party conferences used their votes to side with motions put forward by the misogynist, right-wing of the party.

Through this activity, the nurses union had not only buried the vision of Florence Nightingale, they had driven a stake through the heart of that vision.

A vision that had given nursing its professional identity. That is, nurses were to be agents of change in health care delivery. As Miss Nightingale changed how health care was delivered by educating nurses, ensuring that education was provided by trained female nurse educators and that managers of wards and hospitals were appropriately trained nurse managers, she empowered women. She ensured patients were cared for by nurses with the skills and education appropriate to the task.

As I sipped the coffee, I pondered the warped sense of humanity that faith-based schooling I and my siblings sat through as it taught how important is the sanctity of the womb. A sanctity that overrides any other consideration of a girl’s or women’s well-being when fucked-up violence male violence will stuff up her life.

As long as the sanctity of the womb is protected for purposes that the church prescribes, the mental state of a girl or woman after a man or a gang of men have unleashed their violence upon her, can be addressed through a shrug of the shoulders and specious words about the life of the so-called Virgin May that sneer at the very idea of offering comfort for the terrifying, violent ordeal a girl or a woman has been through.

This male violence is given a wink, and a nod by the male leaders and their acolytes of this Christian church because they, too, see a value in enabling male violence against women.

In that church’s case, this violence takes the shape of their own formulation of the hold ordained Christian men impose on the lives of girls and women.

A hold, like a man’s tight hand grip around the neck of a woman, gently but purposefully squeezing her throat, that calmly and deliberately squeezes the life choices out of the lives of girls and women if they show a tendency to live independently of the control of men.

This hold is relaxed but never removed when girls and women follow the path set out for them by the male-centric values of that Christian church.

This hold reveals its barbaric male-centric strength when it squeezes tightly against the creative power women have to bring life into the world.

As men do not have this power, the full fury of the men and their acolytes of this church is directed at a symbol of that power, the womb. Women’s reproductive choices become the target of this fury in a way that men’s reproductive rights never are.

Girl students attending this church’s schools will be groomed to believe, from the day they enter their first classroom, that the only part of their body that has any value is their womb.

An organ deemed to be so valuable by the men ruling this church that it is not to be used for purposes solely determined by girls or women.

Because those wombs are an invaluable part of the network of controls that both priests and the College of Bishops exercise over the lives of those girl students.

Controls that are promulgated by an older male living in a place in Rome.

A man who will never know the names of these girl students, or even if they are children or teenagers, let alone what their individual interests or dreams may be. But he thinks deeply about their wombs and the use to which they are put.

A use that is to be at the sole say-so of that older pale male as he wanders the corridors of his vast palace pondering that matter.

The girl students, attending that man’s schools scattered across the world, are to be discouraged from thinking, unlike the boys attending the same schools, that their bodies are their own.

These girls are to be emotionally manipulated from any consideration that their wombs are more than just the young virginal organs that the pale male in his palace thinks about.

If a girl or woman strays from that man’s way of and decides that the use of her womb is to be at her discretion, then that female person, whether a child, a teenager or an adult, will face the furious violence of the edicts that man promulgates.

A determination that those girls and women make that they have the right, independent of the fantasies of that man and his acolytes, to use their creative power as solely determined by them. Their wombs are not just organs there to be the playthings of these men, but are part of a wonderful whole, the creative power these girls and women have to bring life into the world.

I wonder as this pale male wanders through the many rooms of his vast palace in Rome does his tongue, or the tongues of the men accompanying him, flicker around their lips when they glance at the pictures of Mary with a baby bump adorning the walls of the palace corridors?

Or, where do you think his mind goes, or the imaginations of the men also residing in that palace go, when they gaze at the sexualised images of the male-named Virgin Mary which decorate the rooms in that palace?

Does it, perchance, stray along the path of a male school teacher at the front of a classroom of young girls when he notices a missing button on the blouse of one of the students? A path stimulated by a sight, meant to be hidden and therefore enticing to the male heterosexual imagination, of young, female flesh.

We may never know.

Having rejected the God of no name and that God’s message of liberation to Joseph in his relationships with women, the leaders of this church have turned towards another power, that is objectified and portrayed in all kinds of deep, dark and mythological ways, to exert control over women.

A power said to have cavorted with women in sexual ways, and therefore, according to men, immoral. Alleged acts that provided men with a social veneer to their unleashing of unconstrained violence in the torture and murder of hundreds of women in the so-called witch trials carried out in both Europe and America.

A power that the male-centric ideology of this church willingly embraces as the male leaders of this church and their acolytes unleash violence against women’s reproductive choices.

Twisted, demonic violence against those choices designed to ensure that wombs are brought under the control of men curtailing the women’s freedom to unleash the creative power of their reproductive rights.

Controls rationalised through the silver-tongued platitudes of men, that have the one cruel, savage foundation: to destroy any attempt for women to gain the unfettered choices men have granted to themselves.

The God of no name has shown that men do not have to let slip into the world the dark, demonic power of male violence against women.

Depictions of Mary were painted with images of what the male mind considered to be the ideal women’s tits at the time the paintings were created.

Bare breasts in the days before the ubiquitous spread of pornography through mass media and the internet to give blokes a socially accepted hard-on as they stood in front of paintings of the so-called Virgin Mary ogling the male painters’ depiction of her breasts.

Breasts they could imagine lying under the clothed statues of the Virgin Mary decorating cathedrals, chapels, monasteries or the homes of priests.

Cold plaster, plastic or concrete statues that could never lessen the warmth of tingling in the loins of male clergy as they got on with the business of a deeply satisfying wank as they lay in their beds in the wee, small hours of darkness before the dawn beckoned them to their priestly or apostolate duties.

A jerking off leaving stains on the handkerchiefs house keepers gossiped about amongst themselves as they did the priestly laundry. Stains from a squirting session fed by the male fetishisation of Mary’s physicality.

This dark purpose, enacted towards women over tens of thousands of years, has led to genetic modifications in men’s DNA. A genetic modification which means men’s violence towards women will be as natural as the air men breathe.

A genetic fault line men display time and time again, as they deny accountability for their violence towards women, with the mantra, spoken in countless languages in numerous societies and cultures across time and the world, of ‘She made me do it!’

This genetic modification is also blatantly on show whenever men spruik messages about the dangers to women that lurk in public spaces.

Patronising messages that have little to do with their avowed purpose of keeping women safe.

Typical male duplicitous messages where their expressed intent has nothing to do with their purpose.

The purpose as always is the control of women and, in this case, the use of fear to prevent women from exercising their rights to move freely around the world. A right granted to the men who promulgate these messages of fear.

Messages that, because of those genetic modifications, come easily to the hive minds of men in their abject horrifying blindness to see that the real basis of that fear is men themselves and the savage violence that they bring into the lives of women.

A violence that is exemplified by these messages of fear and their covert attempt to corral the lives of women into male perceptions of how women are to live their lives.

Whether it be the cruelty and horror of violently imposing restrictions on women’s fertility rights or any of the other male-sanctioned means, both subtle and overt, of defining women’s lives through the prism of men’s needs, desires and wants, this genetic inheritance, as Joseph demonstrated need not define men’s relationships with women.

The business of December 25 is another piece of slick marketing (like the Coca-Cola company giving Santa Claus red trousers and a red coat) by the Jesus Crew.

Pushing into what is now Northern Europe, the Jesus Crew, having successfully dealt with the claims of John the Baptist’s Crew and the claims of numerous self-proclaimed messiahs, were confronted with another threat by the Winter Solstice Festivals.

This was held on the 21st of December; a vast cavalcade of festivals involving what the Jesus Crew considered to be pagan rites and gods. Pagan gods, whom the Jesus Crew considered posed a threat to their claim that their God, the God of the Christians, is the one and only God.

Having downplayed the humanity and acceptance Joseph, after answering the call of God, brought into his relationship with Mary, the Jesus Crew, disregarding the beauty and hope of that inspiring in-breaking of the God with no name, set out to crush these festivals.

Given their size and the number of people involved, the Jesus Crew could not take on these festivals directly. And, as the Roman Festival of Saturnalia ended on the 24th of December, the Jesus Crew picked a day in the calendar that was clear of both festivals but close enough to both to give their celebration significance.

Therefore, they promoted their own festival on the 25th of December where they proclaimed their man as The Man.

To give this claim the stamp of legitimacy and authenticity the Jesus Crew spruiked narratives ( like the ones now found in the Gospels of Mathew and Luke) based on truckloads of gaslighting and just plain, everyday bullshitting.

As this stamp has largely gone unchallenged for two thousand years, questions must be asked of men as to why they so readily will not heed the voices of women and why men continually attempt to silence those voices with the slanderous sweeping misogynistic assertion that the voices of women and girls doesn’t have similar standing to the voices of men.

Though the Jesus Crew’s festival lacked the mix of merriment and solemnity of the Mid-Winter Festivals, it was held inside a building.

As good a place as any to shelter from winter storms for the crowds who were dragooned into attending.

And why not take the opportunity to catch up with the neighbours while the priests at the front of the building babbled on in a language the crowd in the building did not understand? After all, you could be snow bound for weeks and not see the neighbours until the snow melted.