THE TIP OF THE BRIMSTONE - PART 4
TIMELINE OF ABUSE – PART THREE
1981
My Grade Three teacher was Mr ‘Kang’. It was a composite class of kids
from Grade Three and Grade Four. I would be in the same class the following
year for Grade Four. Around that time I had ingrown warts removed from the sole
of my foot, in the right heal. I’d had them for almost two years. They were so
painful I had to walk on the ball of that foot for over a year. Walking that
way threw out my posture and affected the curvature of my spine as I grew.
‘Lilith’ refused to take me to a doctor about it until teachers began
commenting on it. The doc had to burn and cut it out. It was very deep. My foot
was bandaged up for weeks while it healed. I don’t know why she wouldn’t get it
treated sooner. Her behaviour went beyond neglect. It was deliberately malicious.
My grades, despite the constant abuse and hunger, were relatively average. My
teachers always said they thought I could do better. They thought I was gifted.
I had no difficulty with any tasks I was given but was always tired and the
cold left my teeth chattering while I shivered like a leaf. The years passed
but still nobody made any effort to record the bruises and welts that were
visible on the exposed areas of my body. Mandatory reporting was years away and
nobody wanted to get involved. ‘Lilith’ wasn’t a very pleasant person if you
got on her bad side. The very proper, forced accent she used would vanish,
along with the false smile, and nothing but nasty and vicious would be left.
‘Lilith’s’ personality could change in an instant. Without warning. That
was the year she stopped taking ‘Micha’ and me to Melbourne to see the
specialist to treat ‘Micha’s’ lazy-eye. ‘Lilith’ took us to a doctor on the
main street of [DELETED]. I remember she use to take me in for check-ups to,
but I don’t remember anything about what happened except sitting in the waiting
room. ‘Lilith’ use to make me take capsules and tablets but, again, I don’t
know what they were for. I always had trouble swallowing them and she got sick
of shoving them down my throat so she got one of those inhaler things that
ground the top off the capsule and you breathed in when you squeezed it. I
never used it again after that year and I’d been shoving the orange tablets
down the hole where the telephone line ran into the floor for years. I often wonder
what they were for.
I remember that year very well because a small dead-end side street had
been added to [DELETED] Street. [DELETED] Street dead-ended at a farmer’s
boundary fence and the new street was close to the entrance which faced a
bio-lab facility. I don’t know what they did there aside from test blood from
animals to screen for Brucellosis. Among the families that moved into the new
Court was one with a son a few years older than me. He established a bicycle
gang within days of arriving. The kids in the gang were all younger and smaller
than him. He must have been about fourteen. His method was simple. He rode up
to kids in the street and threatened them. The more kids under his control the
scarier he got until all the boys in the street were in his gang. ‘Micha’ and I
were the last he found. There was no room for us in his gang. They needed
someone to bully. We were it. We were told to get out of ‘his’ street so we
just rode our bikes from ‘Lilith’s’ driveway across to the driveway of the
family across the road and back, but that stopped when the gang took up
positions on that driveway and told us we were never to leave our yard.
At the time, ‘Lilith’ had been sending ‘Micha’ and me to the convenience
store at the caravan park behind her house for the last few years. Whenever she
wanted cigarettes or anything else, often just to get rid of us for a while,
she’d give us a handful of change and we’d jump the back fence and walk through
the caravan park to get it. Then houses started going up around us and we had
to walk or ride up the street to the dirt track alongside the caravan park,
then along the highway to get her things. That day, though, we couldn’t. The
bike gang wouldn’t let us out of the yard. Worse, the kid in charge actually
came into ‘Lilith’s’ yard and grabbed me from behind. He held me up in the air
with his hand around my throat and shook me so all the other kids could see,
like some kind of hero. He nearly killed me. The only reason he let go, the
only reason I could breathe again, was because ‘Lilith’ came out and caught
him. She smashed a fist into the back of his head and he dropped like a stone,
then ran away crying. His mother and the bike gang bailed ‘Lilith’ up when she
tried to take me to the doctor. The argument ended when ‘Lilith’ showed her my
throat. Her threats to have ‘Lilith’ arrested stopped when she threatened to do
the same. The bike gang ended that day.
It may sound like ‘Lilith’ had done something good, but all she did was
protect her own interests. She didn’t like anybody challenging her. That kid
had come onto her turf. She never took me to the doc after she’d given me a
beating. It didn’t even bother her that sending us to the corner store through
the caravan park or along the Highway was dangerous. One time the guy at the
shop told ‘Micha’ and me we could go out the back of his shop with him to smoke
the cigarettes if we wanted. I got a real bad feeling about him. ‘Micha’ was
five at the time and I was only seven. We told ‘Lilith’ and she went around and
had a go at the guy. Another time I made the mistake of spending the twenty
cents change on a bag of lollies for me and ‘Micha’ to share. I didn’t have
permission. ‘Lilith’ laid into me with her whip for that one and then gave the
lollies to ‘Micha’.
As I have said, she rarely punished ‘Micha’. One time he had crushed all
her cigarettes up and tried to flush them down the sink. She caught him doing
it. Normally he got away with a lot, the rules that were applied to me were not
applied to ‘Micha’. He didn’t have to do chores and could eat when he felt
hungry. But her cigarettes were taboo. She gave him one stripe with her
whip, and I got two for not stopping him. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t been
aware of his actions. But when she tried to hit ‘Micha’, he moved, and her whip
broke against the stove. The cane inside had snapped in half, but the material
encasing it held it together. When she used it after that it would wrap around
and leave two welts: one across the back of your legs, and another on the side.
‘Lilith’ had been angry when it broke, livid, but smiled maliciously when she
saw the results. The following year I made her damned whip vanish. I climbed up
the garage wall and hid it in the beams near the roof.
1982
My Grade Four teacher was Mr ‘Kang’ again, another composite class of
kids from Grade Three and Grade Four. Around that year two very strange things
occurred. I cannot provide an exact time because my memories are never accurate
regarding times, only events, but they may also have been affected by
concussion or something similar. Firstly, my legs stopped working. It was a
strange and unsettling situation. I just had a pain in my lower back and
couldn’t feel my legs properly. It was like they had suffered pins and needles
when it gets so bad the area goes numb. I couldn’t walk properly and it got so
bad that I had to sit on a bench for the entire school lunch break. In class I
didn’t say anything. Moving resulted in stabbing pain.
At that time ‘Lilith’ and Mrs ‘Stain’ had parted company. Mrs ‘Stain’
had been demanding more and more money, but had been dropping us off with
people she knew for the day and only collecting us again when it was time for
‘Lilith’ to pick us up. ‘Lilith’ found out when ‘Micha’ and I complained about
not being able to swim in her pool and told her we had seen ‘Lauren’. She had
been at the house where Mrs ‘Stain’ left us. We hadn’t seen ‘Lauren’ for years
and had been very excited. The last straw had been when ‘Ranald’, Mrs ‘Sain’s’ son,
a large twenty-something who lived with his mother, had hit ‘Micha’. ‘Ranald’
was a real piece of work. One night he brought greasy chicken wings for our
dinner and made us eat them. ‘Micha’ refused to eat his but ‘Ranald’ made me
sit in the kitchen, in the dark, on my own until I ate them. I threw them in
the bin and he laid into me with his fists after checking the bin and seeing
what I’d done. ‘Lilith’ did not have a problem with that. But when ‘Ranald’
made ‘Micha’ carry a huge plate, which he then dropped and broke, he inflicted
the same on him. ‘Lilith’ did have a problem with that. So Mrs ‘Sain’ no longer
looked after us.
Instead, ‘Micha’ and I had to walk to the ‘McCadman’ house. It was
half-way between the hospital and the school. Two of their children, ‘Eion’ and
‘Meygyn’, were in the same classes as ‘Micha’ and me. Their father was a doctor
at the hospital. They had a pool and an enormous house with a huge yard but,
again, ‘Lilith’ used them for unpaid after-school care until they told her it
was no longer viable. The arrangement remained for ‘Micha’, but I had to come
and sit in the staff room at the hospital after that. The walk to the hospital
that day when my legs stopped working properly seemed to take forever, and was
incredibly painful. ‘Lilith’ got a doctor to do blood tests to see what was
wrong with me, but they couldn’t find a cause and two days later the problem
was gone. But for the rest of my life I’d suffer black-outs that would last for
a few seconds or up to a minute. Everything would just go dark. I’d lose sight
and sound and people would claim I’d just stare into space, unresponsive. And
from the age of fourteen to thirty-three I had a lump in my groin that caused
agonising pain that multiple doctors said I was imagining until it was removed.
After a week of tests, the doctor said he had no idea what it was but a young
female patient he had seen before me had exactly the same thing. I make this
point because it is one of many strange things that occurred which seem like they
are something that should be investigated. But back then, in 1982 when my legs
stopped working, ‘Lilith’ laid into me with a wooden hearth brush when she got
home because she had decided I was trying to get the doctor had asked her about
all my bruises and welts.
The second incident that required a visit to the doctor was the result
of a cricket bat. It had been a gift from ‘George’ and ‘Elisa’, ‘Clyde’s’
parents, when we had visited them after the Christmas of 1980. ‘Micha’ had
hit me in the face with it while he was playing beside the house. I had asked
him to stop swinging it so I could pass on my way back from hanging out the
laundry, but he mustn’t have heard me. The top four front teeth fell out, and
all the rest were loose. My teeth had been perfectly straight before then, with
a gap between the top front ones. There was blood everywhere. The pain was
intense. ‘Lilith’ had come out screaming at me for making so much noise and
went into action when she saw what had happened. She grabbed the teeth, sorted
them, cleaned them off on my shirt, and shoved them back into my gums. It hurt,
a lot. Then she dragged me to the bathroom and made me hold a wet facecloth
over my mouth for almost an hour. The water in the sink quickly turned red. She
went and read her book, smoked her cigarettes and drank her coffee. After that
it was a visit to the hospital. The dentist there said my teeth were still
viable but would need braces to straighten, but we’d have to wait until the
next year for them to settle. I never got braces.
‘Lilith’ didn’t seem that concerned about the incident at all. She was angry though. She blamed me for getting in ‘Micha’s’ way, for wasting her time and for making her take me to see a doctor. Not long before or after then, I can’t recall for sure, she had slammed the back door on ‘Micha’s’ hand. ‘Claud’ had come around. We hadn’t seen him for years. His few visits always ended the same way. He’d try to manipulate and bully her, and she’d try to do the same to him until it all ended in a screaming match and he just left. That time he brought gifts, of a sort. He was working for [DELETED] at the time, the best of the three salesmen, so he said. He gave ‘Micha’ and me a whole heap of promotional stuff. We each got a t-shirt, pencils, erasers, and stickers. But for lunch, ‘Lilith’ made salad and hid a whole heap of celery under ‘Claud’s’ lettuce. He hated celery. Her spiteful act escalated into a full-scale screaming match and ‘Claud’ walked out. ‘Lilith’ had told ‘Micha’ and me to stay inside that time. This was where the flaw in her parenting technique appeared. I always did as I was told. ‘Micha’ did not. When she slammed that door, he was trying to follow her; it took the top off the little finger of one hand. ‘Claud’ just left. He didn’t bother to help deal with the injury. ‘Lilih’ grabbed the finger-tip and wrapped a tea-towel around ‘Micha’s’ hand, then rushed him off to the doctor immediately. The doc did whatever they do, bandaged it up and the finger-tip reattached. A new fingernail grew under the old one until the original eventually dropped off. ‘Lilith’s’ attitude toward ‘Micha’ and medical issues was very different to how she dealt with injuries I suffered.
1983
My Grade Five teacher was Mr ‘McMalleus’. It was a composite class of
kids from Grade Five and Six. Around that year ‘Lilith’ decided ‘Micha’ and I
would play in the [DELETED] junior AFL team. Mr ‘Bannis’, the school sport
teacher, had asked her if I could try out. He thought I had some real talent. I
was able to predict where the ball would be and be there instead of in the
ruckus of kids trying to fight over it. ‘Lilith’s’ father had been teaching me
skills for years. He had purchased a small AFL ball for me one Christmas and
used it to teach me until it went missing. ‘Edward’ was very pleased. He had
been very pleased with my abilities and enthusiasm, but not so much with
‘Micha’s’. ‘Micha’ wasn’t one for running about or working to accomplish
things. ‘Lilith’ agreed to let me play as long as they let ‘Micha’ play too.
She was insistent, telling the coach how much better ‘Micha’ was. The coach had
disagreed until she told him that if ‘Micha’ didn’t get to play, and be in the
forward positions so he could get goals, I wouldn’t be playing at all. We only
played a few games. The competition wasn’t particularly fair, with parents
umpiring in what became very one-sided games.
That year ‘Lilith’ had dated ‘Chris’ and then ‘Brice’ [DELETED]. They
had grown-up in the same area as she had. They had all been childhood friends
and the two brothers came from one of the more wealthy families that owned land
near her parent’s property. ‘Lilith’ had always been motivated by money. She
didn’t like working. She and ‘Claud’ both had the same get rich quick schemes
that involved using other people to get what they wanted. Years earlier, there
had been another guy who use to visit ‘Lilith’. She called him ‘Woog’. One time
he gave her three black and white photos of a seal, some penguins and some
seagulls he had taken on his trip to Antarctica. He had a big Saint Bernard
called “Wilco O’brian Over And Out”. ‘Micha’ and I just called the dog
‘O’brian’. I assumed Woog must have been one of the kids from the ‘O’brian’
family that lived near ‘Lilith’s’ parents, but I never knew for sure. When he
stopped visiting ‘Lilith’ instructed us not to speak about him ever again, and
she emphasised this by beating me if I did. I always remember him whenever I
look in a mirror in the morning. He looked like me and before I brush my hair
it sticks out just like his did, same colour and all. According to ‘Lilith’,
‘Woog’ had developed a drug habit too, just like ‘Tracy’.
But ‘Chris’ only lasted a few months, and then she dated ‘Brice’ for a
few months. At that time ‘Micha’ had driven me out of the big bedroom behind
the laundry in [DELETED] Street. He didn’t like to share. He made it quite
clear everything in the room was his. He would constantly start fights, argue
with me, tell ‘Lilith’ I’d done things I hadn’t and generally make life
miserable. ‘Lilith’, of course, would simply brutalise me because she had an
excuse. ‘Micha’ was only nine. He was bigger than me by then. As tall but
heavier. ‘Lilith’ had been buying him new clothes for years now she no longer
dressed us in matching outfits. I made do with whatever second-hand clothes
people she knew gave us. In the years to come, when this stopped, I got
‘Micha’s’ hand-me-ups when they went out of fashion. But that year I got moved
into the little storeroom wedged between ‘Lilith’s’ room and the bathroom. I
didn’t have much stuff. The model planes ‘Elisa’ and ‘George’, ‘Claud’s’
parents, had been sending me for Christmas had been smashed to pieces by
‘Lilith’ in one of her drunken rampages, so it was pretty much just a bed, a
cupboard and some boxes of stuff ‘Lilith’ stored in there. It was only a ten
foot square room, about a third the size of the one I’d shared with ‘Micha’,
and the walls didn’t stop any of the noise from ‘Lilith’s’ room. She had a very
active social life but the encounters only lasted a few months at a time and
that’d be it for the year.
Between that and her acts of insanity and violence (sober or
intoxicated), I didn’t get a lot of sleep, didn’t put on weight and spent a lot
of time on my own. A lot of the kids my age had started ‘going out’ with girls.
We were ten. I was getting left behind socially. I didn’t really enjoy their
company that much and couldn’t spend time with other kids I knew because of
‘Lilith’s’ behaviour. Other people didn’t want to get in her way so they’d
avoid me. At around that time ‘Lilith’ started restricting my social
activities. She gave me more chores and issued instructions that I wasn’t to
leave the yard. ‘Micha’ could go where he pleased, and she’d even organise to
take him to visit friends whenever he wanted. The reasons for the different
treatment have always confounded me. I have always suspected she was trying to
hide me, or prevent me from being seen or finding out some secret she was
concealing. It was only the school holidays that made me happy. I’d get to go
and spend time with ‘Edward’ and ‘Sharleen’ on their farm. I’d put on weight
and height. I could sleep at night. I’d be happy. My only dread was the end of
the holidays.
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