The Family Law (5 page)

 

Long Distance Call
. I'd resolved to tell Dad I was gay before the year's end, and Christmas was only a few weeks away. Eventually, I just rang him at work. ‘Does your mother know?' he asked. I said that she did. ‘What about Candy – does she know too?' Again, the answer was yes. ‘And your brother?' At that point, I knew how the rest of this would go, and I regretted having so many siblings. ‘It's okay,' he said eventually. But I knew he was referring to the gay thing, not the fact that he was the last to know.

 

Poverty
. There's an unspoken but fierce pride that despite all the odds, and despite all the family history, we still fundamentally like each other. One of the ways we prove this is by purchasing gifts. Over the years, this exercise, especially over Christmas, has become financially crippling. There are just too many siblings. When Candy floated the idea that we do a Secret Santa, everyone balked. But we like gift-buying, we insisted. Now we can't recant. So the cycle continues, and we wallow in extreme poverty throughout January and February, surrounded by shiny gifts, assured that we are loved.

Holes

Australian primary schools are hellmouths of violence and misbehaviour. Over the years, my sister Candy, a teacher, has seen children fight and tear at each other so viciously that they've drawn blood, while other teachers tell me stories about children ripping each other to shreds, teeth and skin flying everywhere. Other kids misbehave in more modest, but no less disturbing ways, like openly masturbating in class with the kind of silent, itchy fervour usually reserved for mosquito bites. If you're a teacher, Candy explained, the most appropriate response is not to call out the student and shame them, but to suggest gently that playing with your genitals is more of a ‘home activity,' to be pursued in ‘private time.'

During my years in primary school, I learned the hard way that friends would even turn on each other for the sake of a laugh. In Year
2
, I'd sometimes leave the morning Christian devotions to rush off and pee. The bathroom closest to us was also the most disgusting, shared by around a hundred of the school's youngest boys. Because of their age, none of them had mastered the art of a steady, aimed stream, so the redbrick dungeon always had a shallow layer of urine stewing on its drainless floors like a murky, sick broth. As you tiptoed in, the soles of your school shoes would get wet, and the heady stink of it all would leave you gagging and wanting to cry. Having just left spiritual devotion that day, hell was on my mind.
Hell was a
hot place
, the pastor had told us,
a hot place where the damned
burned for all eternity
. Hell might be hot, I thought, but it would also smell like this.

As I unzipped my fly, my friend Andy – a spectacled imp of a kid – came in behind me. With his thick glasses and crazy eyes, Andy was known as a practical joker, which was one of the reasons why we liked each other. We made each other laugh.

‘Just wait, Andy,' I said. ‘I need to go first.'

Andy put up his palms, as if to say,
That's cool with me.

‘Hey,' he said, as I started to pee. ‘Have you seen the trick I do when I pee?'

‘What?'

Andy explained how using his stream, he wrote messages, spelled out words, usually his name.

Giggling, I said, ‘What? Like this?'

Keen to impress, I started spelling out my name with my stream.

B, E, N, J—

Then, without warning, Andrew pushed me face-first into the trough. Shocked, my hands flew out to stop myself from falling over, and my palms connected with the slick-wet metal, covering my fingers, arms and sleeves in sour wetness. In one quick motion, I slipped back into my trousers but kept peeing, saturating the legs of my pants and socks. Andy covered his mouth, laughing, and bolted.

It was a dirty trick to pull on a friend. Crying and soaked, I asked the sick bay whether I could be taken home by my mother. They agreed, but only after I had changed into a pair of dry trousers eight sizes too large for me, held up by scrunching the waistband together in my hands. I'd like to say my friendship with Andy ended there, but for some reason we continued being friends as though nothing had happened.

On lunch breaks, I'd watch violence take over the schoolyard. There was the time my friend Brett's hand was impaled with a freshly sharpened HB pencil, and all the occasions when girls pulled one another's hair out and whipped each other with skipping ropes in vicious lashes. One time, an ambulance carted away a small boy who was bleeding from a cracked skull. Everyone knew that a boy named Guy – a huge, aggressive lout who looked twice his actual age – had hurled a brick at the boy's head. No one had turned him in for fear of retribution. As the ambulance pulled away, Guy watched with his arms crossed and chin pointed upwards, as if to say,
Well, that's the
end of that
.

I tried to stay out of trouble. It was only barely tolerable being the victim of a piss-related assault; the idea of being the aggressor or culprit – of marching to the principal's office to explain myself – was unimaginable. By the time I hit Year
3
, I'd developed an impenetrable reputation as the most obedient Asian student in the school. With my bum-part hair and straight As, I could do no wrong.

 

*

 

That same year, Mum was heavily pregnant with my sister Michelle. Although it was Mum's fifth baby, she kept reminding us that it was her sixth pregnancy; she'd lost a baby the year before I was born, and didn't want any of us to forget. As a result of so many pregnancies, her body was starting to give out. In those final months, she had to wear specially designed beige medical tights on her legs, presumably to prevent them from crumbling beneath her like termite-eaten beams. When I came home from school in the first week back, I found her slouching in bed, propped up with a pillow, rubbing her stomach and unable to move.

‘Mum, can you sign this?' I said, passing her a piece of paper.

‘What is it?' she asked.

It was a permission slip for Mrs Reed's Year
3
sex education program. Mrs Reed was a woman with sharp features and a slightly nasal British accent. She sounded the way I imagined an aristocratic English cat would sound, if such a thing existed and was able to speak. Signing the form meant Mrs Reed would teach me all about reproduction – stuff I knew already, thanks mostly to Mum's explicit accounts of childbirth and my late-night torch-lit readings of
The Joy of Sex
in Dad's study.

‘I'll sign it, but I don't know why they need to teach you this stuff,' Mum said, handing the slip back to me and smiling. ‘The other kids, I understand – but you?'

Still, the lessons were surprisingly frank. As a class, we were accustomed to Mrs Reed reading to us from giant storybooks the size of a desk, but we never thought there'd be sex education versions featuring massive, three-dimensional pop-out reproductive organs. Monstrously large-scaled labia opened and folded at us as Mrs Reed turned the pages, like fleshy, winking vertical eyes.
Wink, wink,
the pop-up labia seemed to be saying to us.
Nudge, nudge.

When Mrs Reed turned the next page, a massive ball-sack stared us in the face, silencing us.

‘This,' Mrs Reed said solemnly, ‘is a scrotum.'

With her finger, she proceeded to outline the wrinkly sac of skin, which hung out of the book sadly. We got the sense Mrs Reed didn't much care for the scrotum. She gave it a wary look, as if to say,
So, we meet again, scrotum, my old nemesis.

‘And this,' she said, unimpressed and turning the page, ‘is a man's erect penis.' The giant cardboard penis popped out, fully aroused, pointing at us like a giant, accusing finger. Involuntarily, we rocked back. As she showed us the different parts – the vas deferens, the urethra, the glans – her finger slowly traced the cardboard shaft of the thing, up and down.

Outside, it began to rain.

‘When an adult male is aroused,' Mrs Reed said, ‘the body pumps lots of blood into it, so it becomes stiff. Sort of like …' She trailed off.

‘Like a ruler?' someone asked.

‘Like a bone?'

‘Like a sausage after it's been in the freezer?'

‘No,' Mrs Reed said. ‘It's more like …'

‘Like a rock?'

‘Like a brick, except shaped like a sausage?'

The bell for lunch-time rang.

‘Well, look at that!' Mrs Reed said, snapping the cardboard penis shut, making it retreat immediately. ‘Time to eat.'

While the other kids filed out for lunch, several of us chose to stay inside to avoid the downpour. When we were sure no teachers were around, we opened the pop-up book and started to giggle. We made the labia wink again, then turned it sideways to make it talk like a massive cardboard mouth. ‘Her-ro!' we made it say. ‘My name is Mrs Labia, and my appetite is
gi
-normous! I love eating everything, especially doodles! Pleased to
eat
you!' After we'd endowed every pop-up representation of genitalia with a name and personality – Little Miss Ovaries, Annie the Anus, Clarence the smooth-talking Clitoris – the impersonations of Mrs Reed began.

‘Scroo-tum!' I screamed, straightening my spine, putting on a harsh British accent and pointing at the
3
-D ball-sack with a sharp metal ruler. My impersonation of Mrs Reed was uncanny and everyone knew it. ‘Tes-ticle!' I said, turning the page. ‘This,' I said in Mrs Reed's voice, ‘is a vah-
jarn-
ah! Show me your vah-
jarn
-ah, girls!' Everyone laughed at my comic genius. Then a girl named Courtney interrupted.

‘Ben, no!' she said. ‘Look!'

Everyone gasped and saw the same thing: I'd been tearing the book to shreds with the square edge of the metal ruler. Appalled, I stopped breathing, my mouth hanging open. I turned to my friends, only to find they'd run from the classroom, escaping the scene.

When we reconvened in the afternoon, Mrs Reed's face was red-hot with rage. She made us sit on the floor again and perched the book on her lap, flicking through each page, slowly and accusingly. Looking at them was sickening. The pop-out genitals hung out of the book defeated, all pock-marked and savaged; organs, tendons and nerves flopped out at wrong angles, like the wires of a telephone thrown against the wall. The kids who'd gone outside at lunch-time stared at the book open-mouthed. The rest of us looked to the floor.

‘When I came back to return the book to the library,' she hissed, ‘what did I find?
Holes
.'

Each page she turned made me wince, and my bottom lip began to tremble. ‘No one is leaving this room until I have the names of those who damaged this incredibly expensive book,' Mrs Reed said. ‘We could be here all day, unless one of you tells me what happened. I'm more than happy to wait.'

At that moment I understood what a ‘heavy' silence meant, how you could actually
feel
the oppressive weight of a room full of people holding dangerous knowledge that could indict you. Something had to give, and when it did, it would hurt like nothing else. Already, I could see what was going to happen, and when it did, none of it surprised me: the snitching in front of the other students; the public declaration of my involvement; my croaky admission; Mrs Reed's shock; the other kids giggling; the tears of humiliation as I handed the book of mutilated genitals back to the library.
What kind of a sick child are you?
the librarian wanted to know. It was all too much for a seven-year-old to bear.

 

*

 

By the time Mum gave birth to Michelle, Mrs Reed seemed to have forgotten about the pop-up book incident. The world of education took a new turn, towards promoting self-esteem and ‘special-ness.' See Michael in the corner, who can't control his bladder? He's ‘unique.' Stacey, over there, who's plagued with warts all over her hands? She's ‘interesting.' In this new spirit of promoting everyone's unique qualities, we spent a lesson filling in the blanks on a sheet called ‘ALL ABOUT ME,' which we would personalise and then hang on the classroom wall. We filled in our name, our age, our interests. Then we got to a section that said: ‘I am special because …' While everyone else fretted, that section was easy for me.

‘A year before you were born,' my mother would tell me, ‘I lost my baby. Yes, Mummy miscarried. Oh, I know, it made Mummy so sad! I was bleeding like someone had
stabbed
me – there was so much blood. Afterwards, all I wanted was to get pregnant again, have another baby in me so I wouldn't go crazy from all the sadness. So soon, Mummy got pregnant again and – like magic! – exactly a year after Mummy lost her baby, you were born! To the day, can you believe it? And that's why you're so special. You're Mummy's miracle baby.' It was a strange story, and burdened me with a weird sense of guilt: the only reason I existed was because another potential sibling had died before I was born. Still, it reminded me why I was special.

But when it came to filling out Mrs Reed's activity sheet, I got confused. I knew ‘miscarriage' meant a baby had died before being born, but one girl in my class had told me ‘abortion' meant the same thing.
Abortion
: it had a nice modern ring to it, which I preferred. So I began writing: ‘I am special … because my Mum once had an abortion. And exactly a year later, she had me.'

To this day, I can only assume Mrs Reed felt a misguided pity for my mother. What else could explain why my activity sheet was hung up with everyone else's? She must have assumed my mother had undergone a horrific, government-sanctioned abortion in China and then – horror upon horror – had me a year later, a child born of hideously bad timing and fortune.

Months after I'd realised my mistake, I would wake up at night, panic-stricken at the memory of broadcasting such an incendiary, untrue story about my mother. At least when bad children were caught, they were punished accordingly. There was opportunity for atonement: scores could be settled, sins forgiven. But no one knew about this, and no one ever would, mainly because I couldn't explain the crime. How could I even begin to explain?
I broke your vase. I took your money. I spilled the
milk.
Those are easy to admit. But how does a seven-year-old even begin to say,
I accidentally told my entire class you had an
abortion
?