What could she possibly want to say, I wondered as I walked back down the steps, away from the cinema and my perfect replacement and the reminders of all the bad decisions I’d made. For all the world it seemed that she wanted to say something to me. Carita offered that she had just left school, even though she was in year ten and technically wasn’t allowed to, and gave me a look I couldn’t decipher. I didn’t eat, instead blustering on about how I was quitting because I was going to a loony bin for teenagers, and how I hoped I would get better, and how I wanted to go back to school at the new senior college that had opened. When the casual invited Carita to come to lunch with us, my awkwardness reappeared. ‘She’s way out of your league,’ I hissed in his ear. I wanted to punch him right in the middle of his smug supercilious smile. One of the doormen sidled up, leaning his beefy forearms on the black counter top. ‘Carita’s from my school,’ the casual confirmed. Just as well I was going to a mental hospital, I joked to myself. I was definitely, I concluded, going mad. Her smile was kind, and shy, and made me want to protect her from the base impurity of the world. Then Carita smiled, and all the longing that her unreasonably good looks had generated dissolved. One of the casuals, emerging from the back room, now said, ‘Hey, Jules, this is Carita.’ Carita was evidently drawn from this group, dressed in the same studied casual way, curls of her beach-girl hair framing her heart-shaped face. They were to a person lovely but groomed the way my cousin’s private school girlfriends were, having opinions about clothing, eye makeup and skincare completely alien to mine, and were full of gems of wisdom about topics such as why you should never wear tights darker than your dress, and other information I couldn’t believe anyone cared about. There were a number of casual candy bar staff employed at the cinema, all from the same public but upmarket school which resembled mine in no way at all. Carita symbolised a type of existence, pleasing and easy to navigate, so far from me that merely looking at her evinced a bittersweet longing for the imagined and the impossible. She was yet more proof of why the only place I belonged was in the psych hospital I was about to enter, no doubt filled with awkward, depressed misfits like myself. It wasn’t that I was comparing myself to Carita: she was so beautiful that there was no point. Immediately I understood this girl was from another planet, and there was no way I would have anything in common with her: just the sight of her made me feel awkward in my skin. I’d seen pretty girls before, but Carita was something else: high-cheekboned, perfectly proportioned to my sixteen-year-old eyes, ridiculously graceful in her carriage and gestures. This chapter will, in time, be dedicated to the survivors.Īs I walked across the violently striped carpet from the flight of stairs I’d just ascended and up to the candy bar, I found it necessary to tell myself not to stare.Ĭarita was standing to one side of the freezers in which the teeth-breaking choc bombs were stored after we made them out the back. I am glad, now, that Grace Tame has been so determined to show survivors that silence is part of shaming, among other things. I am proud that the evidence I gave in those trials contributed to keeping a former child and adolescent psychiatrist, Ian Stuart McAlpine, from practicing again after the first trial in 1997 and then to his imprisonment in 2018. Writing the chapter has also required me to think about the continuum of abuse and exploitation, particularly from people in positions of power and authority, that was a constant feature of Carita’s life from when I first met her to her death at 21.įor several decades I have been reticent to speak about what happened to me, to us, at the child and adolescent hospital which no longer exists, although I have given evidence to one inquiry, three criminal trials and one royal commission. The chapter title reflects the gallows humour necessary for living with what even after all this time seems unreal, something which never should have happened. I completed a draft some time ago but needed to go back and fill it in. Dear Reader, despite what could be seen as the flippant heading, this has been the hardest chapter of my memoir to write.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |