A Mother's Story (14 page)

But when we arrived at Greg's place, he wasn't home. He wasn't picking up his phone. And the clock was ticking. As David became more and more agitated, I became more and more stressed – stuck in the middle again and trying to accommodate everyone. We eventually took Luke to a nearby park and waited. Some time later, Greg came sauntering around the corner. As he appeared, I could immediately feel David's hackles rise. Greg feigned surprise to see us, made no mention of being late and put on a show of over-the-top friendliness towards David, which only provoked him more.

In a state of high frustration, David pushed Greg. Greg pushed back. I shouted at them both to knock it off. David pushed again, then Greg grabbed David and put him in a headlock. The pair of them scuffled as I screamed for them to break it up, and Luke started to become really upset. Both of them lost their glasses at some point, leaving them to grapple blind. Two grown men wrestling with one another in broad daylight, neither of them able to properly see the other one – if it wasn't so stressful it would have been comical. Finally I managed to pry them apart. Luckily nothing other than pride had been hurt.

It set the tone for their relationship going forward. They both did their level best to avoid one another, and did their utmost to talk down the other to me. I knew Greg was a disruptive, potentially violent influence in my life – I didn't need David reminding me. He was a problem to which there was no obvious solution – and no amount of complaining about him to me was going to change that simple fact.

When my brother Terry married, I took David back to England to meet my family. We had a wonderful time. Luke was that little bit older, meaning he was better able to connect with my parents and brothers. I felt really close to David and was proud to introduce him to my family, all of whom loved him and loved seeing me so happy.

The wedding itself was lovely. It was just so nice to be there with a date – to have someone by my side to dance with and drink with. A photograph taken at the wedding captured a real intimacy between us – it was a golden moment for us as a couple.

The only jarring note was when, with the best of intentions, my brother took David aside during the wedding reception. ‘Mate, it's so great you're in my sister's life. Since you've arrived she's happier and Luke is a much better behaved kid.'

I felt sad about how little my family understood about my life in Australia. They didn't realise or understand the amount of strain that Greg's abuse put me under as a single mother. They didn't know about my life, and I didn't feel that I was able to explain.

When we got back from England, David proposed to me and gave me the most beautiful ring. I couldn't have been happier. I'd long ago given up on the idea that I'd ever be married, and here I was engaged. It felt really nice. I'd never been the girliest of girls – not one of those women to fantasise about a white wedding. And yet there was something undeniably special about someone wanting to commit to spending the rest of their life with you. I floated happily along in a bliss bubble for a while.

But before we'd had a chance to discuss dates, venues and timings of our nuptials, David lost his job. He was eminently employable, so it wasn't a disaster. But, because of his age, it took a little longer than he would have liked to find gainful employment commensurate with his level of skill and experience.

Soon after David lost his job, he moved in with me and Luke at Tyabb. In stark contrast to Greg, David conducted himself admirably during that time, getting up to go to the gym every morning, applying for jobs every afternoon.

Not long after he moved in, David began agitating to bring forward the wedding ceremony. But I wasn't in the mood for rushing it. I hadn't been married before. If, as seemed likely, I was only going to get one shot at having a wedding, I wanted to do it right. I wanted friends and family to attend from England, I wanted a lovely venue and a degree of planning. I wanted it to be special, not something you squeezed into the next available weekend, which caused tension between us.

In the meantime, things began to subtly change between us. In so many respects, David was an excellent influence on Luke
and on me, teaching Luke about discipline and teaching me about the importance of creating boundaries. But it seemed that the more David was exposed to Luke, the more his tolerance for him waned. Perhaps David felt on the outer of the tight-knit two-person world that Luke and I had come to function in. I respected David's right to discipline Luke whenever it was appropriate, but often there was implied criticism of my mothering skills in his behaviour, which only served to drive a wedge between us.

In the end, I simply didn't see David wanting to be a father to Luke, which was more than fair enough. He had his own children, and Luke technically already had a father – which was no small part of the problem.

Greg put an enormous strain on David's and my relationship. He was the unwelcome, overbearing third person in what should have been a couple. And as he had done in so many other parts of my life, he eventually managed to sabotage my relationship with David and destroy my chance at finally getting married.

David and I broke up a few months later and I handed the engagement ring back. I was devastated. I kept thinking that perhaps we would work out our differences. But all my attempts to contact him were more or less rebuffed. Reluctantly, I convinced myself to move on.

My life returned to its pre-David rhythm. I worked, Luke went to school and Greg dipped in and out of our lives. But for a few notable incidents, Greg had demonstrated his ability to adhere to our custody-sharing arrangements while largely leaving me alone during my relationship with David. With David gone, however, I was once again isolated. Experience alone should have told me it would only be a matter of time before Greg started circling again.

When Luke was in Year 3, I decided to move him to Flinders Christian Community College, which was across the road from Tyabb Public School and at the end of our street. One of those modern private schools that have popped up on the periphery of major cities, the college boasted a state-of-the-art campus and a reputation for strong academic results.

Luke's first few months there were tough going – as is often the case with kids moving to a new school – but he soon started to forge his way. He developed a reputation for being the kid who would always be ready to entertain the class with a quip or a joke. He enjoyed attention and had the mildest streak of exhibitionism. You only had to watch one of the many home videos he recorded of himself to see a performance gene lurking in there somewhere. My son the ham.

Around the same time, I enrolled Luke in weekend sailing lessons down at Mornington. On his very first morning, I dropped him down at the yacht club where Greg had come to watch. I stayed for a while to make sure Luke was having fun,
and then went off shopping, expecting Greg to return Luke home after the lesson.

I arrived home to a series of garbled messages on my answering machine from people I didn't know at the yacht club. They said something about an ambulance having been called and someone having been taken to hospital. I flew into a panic, thinking something had happened to Luke.

As it turned out, it was Greg. The weather had taken a turn and the waters had become choppy. The children were all corralled inside, and a couple of the dads went down to the water's edge to secure the sailboats. While Greg watched on, a cleat broke off from one of the boats and flew several metres, smashing into Greg's wrist. If it had hit him in the head, he would have been killed.

Relieved that Luke was okay, I rushed to the hospital to find Greg in a state of high agitation – clearly in a large amount of pain, but more distressed about being detained in hospital than anything else. The doctors and nurses didn't know what to make of him. His wrist had been tended to, he had been made as comfortable as possible, and yet he kept railing against being held in hospital. He point-blank refused to let Luke in to see him, saying that he didn't want his son to see him in that state.

Greg was refusing to receive visitors, but I contacted his brother, whose number I still had in my address book. I felt sorry that Greg was badly injured and I did what I would do for anyone in that situation and visited him in hospital. I found him lying prostrate on the bed, utterly deflated. He had clearly been crying. I had brought him fruit to eat, because I knew, given his paranoia, he would hate being in hospital. Sure enough, he was convinced they were putting poisons into him and that ASIO were monitoring his hospital stay.

He remained in hospital for a couple of weeks and it almost broke him. His family came to visit at some point. They hadn't seen Greg for a few years and were shocked to see him so vulnerable.

One afternoon, the director of nursing took me to a side room and told me they'd had to restrain Greg. He had wanted to close the curtains between the nurse station and his bed, so convinced was he that he was being spied on. But the hospital staff wouldn't let him, fearing that he was suicidal. His anger flaring, he had picked up and thrown a water jug at the window and started abusing the staff. It took several people to sedate and wrestle him back into bed.

I was certain they would not discharge him without giving him a psychiatric assessment. There was no way, I reasoned, that trained medical professionals could be exposed on a daily basis to Greg and his manic behaviour and not conclude that he had undiagnosed mental health issues. But while I wasn't entitled to know what medical assessments were done it seemed to me that he left without any kind of psychiatric check.

With nowhere to live and a wrist to rest, he retreated to his parents' home an hour north of Melbourne, where he took up residence in a bungalow at a nearby property. The compensation from the yacht club had started to dribble in, which gave him enough of a financial cushion that he didn't feel the need to harass me. And so, for another ten months or so, I was insulated from Greg, only briefly crossing paths with him when we met for the Luke handover. For the first time in a long while, I felt vaguely confident about the quality of the accommodation that Luke was staying in when he spent the night with his dad. But Greg eventually tired of living so far away from Luke and decided he wanted to move closer again.

Luke's petition to get a parakeet for ‘his next pet'

He started taking Luke camping during his access visits. He had a tent and other camping equipment but it was more often than not an activity born of necessity, because he didn't always have a home. Then I became aware that on some overnight access visits Luke had slept in Greg's car, and I was very concerned. But Greg had put the fear of God into me and had threatened to kill me if I prevented him from spending time with his son.

Before long, Greg stopped keeping Luke overnight, much to my relief, preferring to return him to me at Tyabb then drive down to the water's edge at Hastings to sleep in his car.

Since the hostel in which he had been staying in Caulfield had been demolished, its tenants had been left to fend for themselves. For a brief period afterwards, Greg had once again worked the Hare Krishna and Mormon Church circuit in St Kilda. But this time, he wore out his welcome with remarkable speed. And so he'd become a vagrant, sleeping in his car and using the showers at the public swimming pool.

I often paid for tickets for Greg and Luke to do things so they could have some quality father and son time together. Of course, there was never any acknowledgement from Greg of my financial outlay: it would have been too much of a concession of failure on his part.

With David no longer in the house, Greg started encroaching on our lives again. Many was the morning that I would wake up to find his car parked outside on the nature strip. As we ate breakfast, he would let himself onto the property and come around the back of the house.

It was around this time that I bought a mobile teddy-bear-making business, and my garage became a warehouse for bear ‘skins' and stuffing. Luke was about to turn ten, which meant I had more time in any given day to dedicate to my new business
venture. Ten-year-olds, I was fast discovering, have far less need for their mothers than younger children. Luke had grown into a remarkably mature boy for his age. I don't know whether it was because he was so often in the exclusive company of adults, or whether it was because of his atypical home life, but he had a wisdom about him. And yet, in so many other ways, he was still a little boy. He would never let me tell me anyone, but he had recently resumed the habit of creeping into my bed at night and sleeping next to me. And always, he needed to have his feet touching mine.

He was a funny kid, too. It seemed with every year that passed the ham in him only grew in stature and eccentricity. He had taken to filming himself and uploading the videos on YouTube. Nothing especially noteworthy, just a young kid mucking around, mostly talking gibberish. I was proud of the independent, kind, good-looking young man he had become. He was my companion: the one constant in my life. And I lived for him.

It was mid-May when I took delivery of a huge order of teddy bears and was completely overwhelmed. Greg dropped Luke off one afternoon and, seeing me struggling with boxes and shelves, asked if I needed some help. Without waiting for my response, he started putting up shelves and unpacking the boxes. It was a pattern I was smart enough to recognise: I needed help, I was vulnerable and Greg saw it as an opportunity to turn on the kindness and inveigle himself further into my life.

One afternoon not long after, I was working the franchise in Narre Warren and got stuck in traffic on the way home. Greg was due to collect Luke that evening, so I phoned to ask if he could come to Tyabb earlier and pick up Luke from school. He made it halfway there before his car broke down. He walked the
rest of the way to Luke's school and collected him, as promised. I phoned ahead and asked my friend to take them both to footy training.

By the time they returned, I was at the stove cooking dinner. In a fit of ten-year-old pique, Luke took one look at the meal I was preparing and said he didn't like it and had no intention of eating it. I had worked all day, had the looming presence of Greg in my house and wasn't much in the mood for a critique of my cooking skills. And so I started to become snarky with Luke. I then asked Greg where he was planning to sleep that night, since his car had broken down. He became agitated, intimating that my innocent enquiry was somehow a slight on his homelessness: a subject about which he was very touchy.

‘You can sleep here tonight if you need,' I heard myself say. The thought of him walking back to wherever his car had broken down, or worse still, me dropping him off to his car in the dark for him to crawl into and sleep, seemed too cruel. The bleeding heart in me had won again.

‘You can sleep in Luke's bed if you like, and he can sleep with me,' I said.

It was as if a switch had been flicked. He looked at me threateningly. ‘Is Luke sleeping in your bed?' he said accusingly, his tone rising to one of indignation. ‘Is he sleeping with you again?' It was one of Greg's bugbears. He was convinced I was somehow making his son soft.

‘Oh Greg, just drop it,' I said. ‘Forget about it. It's probably best if you just leave. I want you out of my house now.'

He stared at me for a moment and there was silence. Luke hung his head. I could feel the tension rising in the room. Then, fulminating and muttering to himself, Greg collected his things and stormed out the front door.

‘What did you go and do that for?' Luke said, clearly annoyed with me.

‘Oh seriously, Luke? Not you too? I was not going to be spoken to like that by your father.'

‘No!' Luke replied petulantly. ‘Why did you tell him I'd been sleeping with you?' He was embarrassed that he was still afraid of the dark and crept into my bed every night. He was angry that he would now be forced to explain to his father why he slept with his mother. He was mad, moreover, that I had somehow provoked such an extreme reaction in his dad.

Before either of us knew what was happening, Greg burst back in the front door and came flying towards Luke in the living room.

‘Greg!' I shouted. ‘What are you doing? Get out of my house! Leave him alone!'

He bore down on Luke, who was sitting on the lounge, and in a rage, started yelling at him. ‘How long has this been going on?' Luke cowered in front of him, clearly terrified.

Instinctively, I leaped across the living room to stand between them to protect my little boy.

Greg turned his rage towards me. I saw that manic look in his eyes – a look I knew so well – and took flight. Greg started chasing me though the house – past the kitchen, through the living room, around the dining table. At some point, he picked up a glass vase and started coming at me, the vase raised threateningly above his head.

I grabbed the phone and frantically dialled triple zero. Luke was crying on the lounge, begging his father to stop. I shouted my address into the receiver as I continued to evade Greg's grasp. He chased me into a corner and started grappling with me for the phone. I began to scream.

Ripping the phone from my grasp, Greg grabbed me by the hair and pulled me to the ground. The pain was intense as he yanked at my hair, but the fear was greater. He lifted the vase above his shoulder and held it close to my face. I raised my hands to cover my head, bracing for the blow. I begged him to let me go, to leave Luke alone. ‘Leave! Just leave us alone!'

Luke begged his father to stop. ‘Get off her! Leave her alone!' he was crying. ‘Call the police, Mum! Call the police!'

Greg aimed his boot at my thigh and kicked me.

Then there was silence. I opened my eyes. Greg had gone. The only sound was Luke's whimpering and my own laboured breathing.