PLUMBAGO

A novella by Eleanor Wills

with accompanying exegesis

THE AFTERMATH OF PSYCHICAL TRAUMA: FINDING A VOICE

Creative Writing

Discipline of English

School of Humanities

The University of Adelaide

Submitted 2/3/2017

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title page ……………………………………………………………………………... i

Table of contents ……………………………………………………………………… ii

Abstract ……………………………………………………………………………….. iii

Thesis Declaration ……………………………………………………………………. iv

Plumbago

1. A Crisis …………………………………………………………………………... 1 2. John ………………………………………………………………………………. 8 3. Autumn 1991 …………………………………………………………………….. 11 4. Abigail …………………………………………………………………………… 14 5. Annie …………………………………………………………………………….. 19 6. Number 24 ……………………………………………………………………….. 24 7. Recurring Dreams ………………………………………………………………... 29 8. David ……………………………………………………………………………... 32 9. Plumbago ………………………………………………………………………… 37 10. Fitting In …………………………………………………………………………. 41 11. A Day Unfolds …………………………………………………………………… 43 12. A Misfit …………………………………………………………………………... 49 13. “Put Your Boy On The Street” …………………………………………………... 52 14. The One That Got Away …………………………………………………………. 58 15. Sinning …………………………………………………………………………… 63 16. Dead Ends ………………………………………………………………………... 75 17. “It’s Your Life” …………………………………………………………………... 85 18. “Please Don’t Go, Min” ………………………………………………………….. 96 19. Plumbago ……………………………………………………………………...... 106

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ABSTRACT

My thesis consists of two parts: creative writing in the form of a novella called Plumbago and an exegesis The Aftermath of Trauma: Finding a Voice. Both parts explore the unknowing and the knowing aspects of trauma, asking how we can speak of trauma as having a positive aftermath when its unassimilated nature randomly haunts its victim? The voice as a truth carrier embedded in the traumatic wound is a focus of this work. Plumbago investigates the role the unconscious plays in trauma as part protector, part destroyer of self as well as a source of healing. The protagonist, Rebekah Bentley, is born into a religious cult in suburban Adelaide. Rebekah is forced to live in a bubble of fear, intimidation and absolute control until she finds the courage to break free. Voices from her brother, her workplace and within have a profound effect in enabling her to find a way out of a suffocating environment. The creative work takes an aspect of Caruth’s theory where the unconscious is shown to have a capacity to draw on otherness and voices from either outside of the self or from within speak a truth. This truth is captured by the listening ear to transition into the conscious mind where it directs the self to a place of healing.

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THESIS DECLARATION

I certify that this work contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in my name in any university or other tertiary institution and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference has been made in the text. In addition, I certify that no part of this work will, in the future, be used in a submission in my name for any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution without the prior approval of the University of Adelaide and where applicable, any partner institution responsible for the joint award of this degree.

I give consent to this copy of thesis, when deposited in the University Library, being made available for loan and photocopying, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968.

I acknowledge that copyright of published works contained within this thesis resides with the copyright holder(s) of those works.

I also give permission for the digital version of my thesis to be made available on the web, via the University’s digital research repository, the Library Search and also through web search engines, unless permission has been granted by the University to restrict access for a period of time.

I acknowledge the support I have received for my research through the provision of an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.

……………………………

Eleanor Wills

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PLUMBAGO

1. A Crisis

Rebekah was loading her dishwasher when a heavy sensation swept across her forehead. This weighty cargo exploded into a series of images that tumbled, clanged, slid and dived across her vision. Green felt carpet, Abigail, pink candlewick bedspread,

Abigail, Annie’s chair, Abigail, Annie, Abigail… The impact of this sudden strobing had her slumped over the open door of the dishwasher, her arms outstretched to clutch the lip of the kitchen sink above. She tried to speak but the words were not there. Instead the bent figure wailed in short bursts of sound which accompanied each breath for that is all she could manage.

Imposing images with a will of their own pushed and pulsated inside, rendering her powerless in the face of unravelling madness. Eventually she managed to stumble from the kitchen to her bedroom where she flung herself on her bed to sob and pummel the pillows.

The episode took hours to subside, leaving her drained and shaken with a new type of mess to deal with.

Rebekah was left with a cavernous space of disarray. She needed to regroup; to rebuild the smashed shelves, repaint the chambers and attend to furnishings. Where to start? Her world had begun its inward spiral twenty four hours earlier when she learnt that her father had died. The news came as a shock. She hadn’t seen her parents for twenty one years and during that time her life had been consumed by her immediate family and friends, so she was jolted when she realised that John was eighty and her mother Annie eighty-four. Her dad had dropped onto the footpath after suffering a massive heart attack while out walking.

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His death prompted Abigail to telephone. Mother wants to see you. Would 2.30pm suit? Rebekah hesitated. An absence of twenty-one years meant that she rarely thought of them– that is until a phone call plunged her back into a life that she thought she had left behind. Her sister’s voice: restrained, soft, unemotional—dad died yesterday at 3.05pm from a massive heart attack followed by Annie’s request for an appointment dragged her backwards into the gloom of family secrets. At first she tried to recapture her day. A Lily

Pilly growing outside of her window was at its best with bunches of mauve berries hanging amongst the thick green foliage. Now it kept slipping out of view, nudged aside by a dark secret that was determined to push in and be heard. Memories of her father’s broad happy face, his story telling and infinite patience emerged against a looming backdrop of poverty and denied opportunity.

Rebekah decided to keep her mother’s appointment mainly because John’s death had forced her to realise with a rush that she had things to say to him. She wanted to say that she was sorry that their relationship hadn’t worked and that she did appreciate his hard work in keeping the home front going. Of course she would have liked to have said these things to a living John but that opportunity had passed so the next best thing was to address his body and hope that the words stayed within the casket when the lid was fixed and the coffin lowered into its grave.

She walked into her old home at 2.30pm sharp the next day with a purpose. Her sister Abigail let her in then re-latched the wire door. Just inside the front door the green floor rose and snarled at her. This was the time when in retrospect she should have turned around and fled back to her car. But that did not happen. Her sister’s demeanour—no eye contact, hands clasped in front, carefully scripted words delivered in monotone—slammed into Rebekah’s consciousness with a sensation that knocked her sideways. Dressed in a frock of blue fabric patterned in small white print with a Peter Pan collar, white and edged

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in lace met Rebekah’s gaze. Little fabric covered buttons ran in a line down Abigail’s dress bodice. White cuffs on puffed shoulder short sleeves and a slightly gathered skirt that fell to mid-calf were matched with thick strapped white sandals. Her hair, lifeless, uncut and an unbecoming steel grey draped from a middle part on her forehead to tuck behind each ear like heavy window drapes parted at the window centre and clipped on either side.

Rebekah felt as though she was in a museum where her gaze rested on a display of a Jane Austen dress code for females except that this was 1991 and there were no glass cabinet displays. Rebekah breathed deeply and pushed onwards. A trembling of green felt announced Annie’s walking frame bringing her mother into view.

“Hello Rebekah,” said Annie. “Come on through.”

To “come on through” takes Rebekah past the hall table that Abigail bought some thirty years ago. On it sat a vase of artificial flowers. In the lounge room her dad’s open casket stood at the far end. Opposite the casket, three chairs were placed. A fourth sat apart from the other three. Rebekah was directed to the fourth chair sitting beneath the curtained window. She sat, placing her handbag on the floor. She waited.

“I love you all,” Annie said. “I love David, Abigail, you Rebekah and Priscilla. I should have been stricter with you, Rebekah.”

Some of the springs in Rebekah’s chair seat had collapsed forcing her right buttock to rest on higher ground. The uncomfortable angle affected the way she placed her legs.

Her right transferred its weight to her left foot digging deeply into the green felt. There she perched while an apparition cloaked in black moved towards her and circled her chair.

Something that she had forgotten began to take shape. It was Annie’s chair, her mother’s reading chair she was sitting in.

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Her mother’s words seemed to have their genesis beneath the chair. It wasn’t a rumbling exactly but more of an association that reached Rebekah. The angled discomfort of resistance that Rebekah adopted to prevent her from tipping into her mother’s long hours of sitting coincided with Annie’s declaration of love for her children. Rebekah heard her mother’s words bump and bruise across the debris of a destroyed family. Her arm reached for her handbag. In the melee that had greeted her visit, she had lost direction and now felt anxious to speak softly to her father’s body and leave.

“May I?” she asked.

Annie nodded and remained seated while Rebekah moved towards the casket.

Despite an absence of twenty one years and some facial abrasions that the fall had given her dad, she recognised the broad face and saw his happy expression. Hello dad, she began but the words backed up in her throat and the green moved beneath her feet, disorientating her. It’s too late she thought as she turned away from the casket, her eyes downcast on the green before the felt ran out and another surface, equally familiar, rose before her. A gap of exposed polished floor boards (or were they painted?) met a pink floral floor rug.

She was looking through the open door of her old bedroom. Eyes swung upwards to rest on her single bed. Hers was the one closest to the door. My bed she thought absurdly as if she had some ownership of the place. The pink candlewick bedspread, tucked as it was under the pillow, took her back to the morning she left. It had to be the same candlewick. She wanted to pull the bedspread back to examine the pillow for a tea stain she remembered and to look closely at the way the sheet folded back. But what would that achieve? She remembered her brother David’s room and how it was kept exactly as he

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had left it until her younger sister Priscilla took possession. There was no one left to take her bed. Abigail’s room was the other side of the kitchen.

Rebekah turned to face her mother, who had left her chair to follow at a distance and now leaned heavily on her walking frame Rebekah felt Annie’s judgemental eye cast over her dress for a second time and realised with a jolt the control her mother continued to wield.

Before leaving home for this visit, Rebekah had left her dressing room in an upheaval of open cupboard doors and drawers while she dressed, changed and dressed again for her mother. In this generally unchanged environment of her secret home Rebekah saw with a troubling clarity a life that she had shared once and one that had a continued influence over the way that she behaved.

Abigail stood silently as if on sentry duty to Annie. Thin, dull eyed, torn apart.

That’s how Rebekah saw her sister. She wanted to pin her mother against a wall until she admitted that she had ruined Abigail’s life. That Annie’s commitment to serving some imagined deity instead of reaching out to her children had resulted in Abigail spending her life in service… to her. She wanted Annie to acknowledge her selfishness. But of course an eruption like this would never do.

“Goodbye Mother,” she said.

Annie nodded in response.

……..

There is anger at the injustice of the unforeseen. All Rebekah did was respond to a request from her mother to visit her old home. The occasion was the death of her dad yet the visit had almost …not almost (she must correct herself) but certainly bypassed her

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dad’s body in the casket to focus on the living remnants of her destroyed family. To find that what she had set out to do in good faith had resulted in her mother and Abigail claiming centre stage, uninvited and intrusively, was a family betrayal of the highest order.

The fact that things hadn’t changed much was an assault in itself but Abigail’s broken demeanour was a hard edge that burrowed deeply.

Another worrying aspect to Rebekah’s untimely home visit was the insistent voice in her head that told her that the years of forgetting her past were now over. This voice was talking before she pulled into the driveway of her own home. The snarling felt carpet at the secret home felt at once menacing and familiar. She had lived there once. She had lived with silence and unadorned walls. I lived there under sufferance, she told the voice. I never belonged. I’m not them, I never was; I am not racist or sexist nor do I see the world in their black and white binaries.

Rebekah was anxious to silence the voice so as to regain control over her life. The voice had other ideas. It pushed fragmented memories of her past before her, forcing a narrative of dead ends, open highways, pain, survival and freedom. She planned to allow a couple of hours each day in a quiet part of the house and with pen and paper map out an understanding of what attacked her. To do this she had to put herself behind a tall fence that enclosed her young life. She decided on a cyclone fence to allow her a view of the outside world into which she escaped. As she delved into her secret, there were times when her horizons darkened but they were never obliterated.

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2. John

John Bentley was born in Port Pirie in 1910, the eldest of four boys and seven sisters. His often unemployed father spent his time gambling and drinking at the local pub.

His economically dependent mother smiled her way through deprivation. In the 1920s, the family moved to a rented three room dwelling in the slums of the West End in Adelaide.

This was John’s secret. He did not talk much about the West End. Whenever his stories veered towards that territory he might say never mind and take another direction. Nor did he ever disclose his mother’s first marriage to Tufie Kuseff and the two children that were placed under State care.

Grinding poverty robbed John of his right to an education. Pulled out of primary school to help his mother support her large family, he spent most of his day pushing a wheelbarrow load of rabbit carcasses, hoping for a sale.

In this neighbourhood John met Mary McLeod. Her family arrived at the West End in 1929 from Glasgow, Scotland. Her father, a shipwright, had worked on the docks of

Port Glasgow, Renfrewshire, when work dried up. The family emigrated not realising that the Great Depression had spread its misery to Australia.

John became engaged to Mary and soon after, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

During her illness, he helped Mary’s mother nurse her daughter who subsequently died. By that time, John had formed a close attachment to the McLeod family, particularly to Mrs.

McLeod.

Mary’s family endured their share of hardship with a particular type of stoicism that connected with a religious fervour of accepting one’s lot. The matriarchal guardian of the McLeod household was an ardent church-goer. She did not permit complaint, alcohol,

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smoking, gambling, boxing or swearing in her God-fearing home. Meals were eaten together at a set time and however humble the food on the table was, the Almightly was invariably thanked for His generosity. John was impressed by the orderly way that the

McLeod family went about their lives, so different to his rowdy siblings who showed none of the restraint that he had grown to admire. The McLeod sobriety built character by stamping a quiet dignity on its adherents and he wanted to be like them. It wasn’t long before he transferred his affections from Mary to her older sister Annie.

The second eldest girl and the sixth sibling to her five brothers and three sisters,

Annie accompanied her mother to their Wright Street church every Sunday. She was a serious girl, associating with Christians who took the Ten Commandments seriously and believed that they were a cut above everyone else as God’s Chosen. It wasn’t long before

John began distancing himself from his family in favour of Annie’s church group. He decided to become one of them, willingly giving up cigarette smoking, boxing and dancing to take his place amongst the elite.

John’s newly developed religious faith was never as strident as Annie’s—in fact it could be described as lip service to a greater need. He happily went along with its deep conservatism. If John had any qualms over the church’s treatment of women, he did not show it. These women were servants of men. Not allowed to work outside of the home once they were married, they were expected to bear many children and never offer an opinion. It was a world of good/evil, right/wrong, heaven/hell, the righteous and the unrighteous, sexism, racism and uncompromising judgement. John’s focus was on the promise of full employment and a life of high moral standing lifting him out of the wretchedness of his childhood.

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John and Annie married in 1939 and became parents to David in 1940 then Abigail in 1941. A seven year gap due to John’s service in the Australian Army separated the first two children from Rebekah’s birth in 1948 and Priscilla’s in 1950.

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3. Autumn 1991

The days have shortened and a distinct cooling air slides under the remnants of past summer heat. A few months after John’s death Rebekah is thin and pale, with a persistent cough that developed surreptitiously at first. She accumulates a stock of cough mixtures and pastilles from her local pharmacy. None seem to work and soon she is feverish and coughing the night away. She makes her bed at the far end of the house so as to minimise disruption to the rest of the family’s sleep. Her doctor is flummoxed. He sends her to specialists on the basis of her complaints about head pain. Rebekah continues to lose weight. Her husband Richard wanders into the kitchen for a drink and hears her coughing.

Richard immediately calls her doctor who arrives within the hour to take her temperature and to put his stethoscope on her chest. She is sent for an x-ray of her lungs.

The prognosis based on the x-rays is grim. The radiologist leaves his station to find

Rebekah waiting in her cubicle until she is given the go ahead to get dressed. He asks if she is a smoker and has she had cancer?

She waits with Richard in a respiratory specialist’s rooms. The matter is urgent and her appointment has been prioritised. Richard and Rebekah leave the consulting rooms deeply shaken. They have heard a chilling prognosis. If she has lung cancer then she has weeks to live. That night Rebekah is in hospital for further testing. Three days later a diagnosis of Wegener’s Granulomatosis is confirmed. She rings her family.

Abigail takes the call. She listens attentively. She tells Rebekah that Annie is in the room and passes the receiver to their mother.

“I’m very ill Mother. Abigail has the details.”

“You should have spoken to me first,” Annie said. “After all I am your mother.”

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“You know now, let’s leave it at that.”

“Well then, you can ring me with further developments.”

Too engrossed in her own dilemma to take in her mother’s words you can ring me with further developments, the days pass without a phone call let alone a visit. Another break down threatens. Annie hovers at the edges of her consciousness like a shimmering mirage. A night of high fever ends with a torch being shone by a nurse gently lifting her eyelids, searching for signs of life. At first she is annoyed that her state of nothingness is interrupted until she sees the light of the morning sun reaching into the ward through the lower half of a window. The tenuous thread of hope that had briefly brought Annie into

Rebekah’s field of vision snapped. The night of turbulence coincided with heavy doses of prednisolone and cyclophosphamide. Prescribed drugs were where her salvation lay. She was not going to waste energy on trying to understand a mother who couldn’t be bothered making contact with her seriously ill daughter.

Rebekah began to experience the side effects of the medical drugs that she was taking. Cyclophosphamide caused her hair to fall out and Prednisolone puffed her face to the point that she barely recognised her reflection in the mirror. In the midst of this turmoil a phone call from Abigail announced Annie’s death.

Eighty five and this was Annie’s third stroke, the one that ended her days. Rebekah wanted to say of her mother that she had a good innings and leave it at that. She poured into her sister’s ear a litany of grievances against Annie’s indifferent parenting ending in a shrill voice with her own version of their mother’s unacceptable behaviour towards her very sick daughter.

………….

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After the phone call, Rebekah walked across her kitchen and stood behind the timber framed glass door that led to the garden. It was a soft, unhurried early spring evening. She watched the last vestiges of the day slide under the cover of a darkening sky.

A lemon scented gum tree stood sentry against the changing light. Its smooth white trunk promised to hold its shape despite the gathering dusk. Soon the streetlight would cast its soft glow from behind.

Rebekah imagined her mother quietly going about her day then retiring, soon after her evening meal. Sleep would come to her quickly, she was a sound sleeper. The curtains would have been drawn. Abigail would hover close by to ensure that their mother was comfortable. She would have placed a glass of water on the bedside table then switched off the light, leaving the door ajar. During the night sleep became death.

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4. Abigail

Four kilometres away in the family home, Abigail fills the kettle. She gazes through her kitchen window waiting for the water to boil. Her caring role has come to an end. She will sell the home and move closer to her friends. Another life adjustment looms.

She is not unhappy about the prospect of living alone. Since John’s death Annie had changed her dependence onto her and there were many occasions when Abigail felt as if she was treated as a servant. Only the other day, when she returned from grocery shopping, lugging heavy bags into the kitchen then putting their contents away before making a cup of tea for Annie, was she reminded of her role to fetch and carry.

She no sooner placed Annie’s favourite china cup and saucer in front of her, another for herself, poured the tea, and drew a chair to the table before Annie spoke.

“Thank you Abigail. Now you had better be getting on. There’s plenty for you to do,” said Annie who had not lifted a finger towards the preparation of her tea.

Abigail made excuses for her mother all along. Annie had suffered serious depression. After losing her firstborn in a speedway crash, she understandably withdrew from company after criticism about her neglect of the home and her children reached her ears. Annie was misunderstood.

Abigail couldn’t help but feel the distance between her and her mother. She tried to penetrate the screen that surrounded Annie and one that had become more obvious since

John’s death. Her efforts had not succeeded. An unpleasant truth hovered about her consciousness. It spoke to her of the peril of living a dutiful life. John and Annie’s expectations of her single female status metamorphosed naturally into her being their carer, leaving little space for her own needs. John’s death brought greater demands from

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Annie. Abigail felt the poignancy of Rebekah’s question about whether she had ever got closer to Annie. She was quick to assure her sister that she did.

“What did you get to know?” Rebekah had enquired.

“English was our mother’s favourite school subject; David’s death nearly killed her and your leaving home made her realise how wrong she was to be so soft with you.”

Both sisters agreed that their mother didn’t help herself. Her reclusiveness underwent many interpretations by her puzzled family. Was she ill? shy? lazy? disappointed? An early arthritis sufferer, Annie never sought medical advice and retreated further into an indifference towards her home and family sparing her religion and John.

Waiting for the tea kettle to come to the boil, Abigail sees her twelve year old self scrubbing the toilet pan with a flat brush, the unused bristles connected to a wooden base that is shaped for a female hand. A bucket of hot water, a tin of Vim, velvet soap and

White King sit on the floor. She scrubs into the dark recesses of a filthy toilet, driven by shame and the knowledge that dinner guests are expected. Annie had laughed. You won’t move those stains, she said.

She hears her mother’s dismissive tone. Her child self’s upturned face is directed expectantly towards the laundry door where Annie briefly pauses. The young, blemish-free face expresses a simple wish to be helpful, to please and to make her mother happy.

Disappointed she turns back to the stained pan to resume her scrubbing.

Annie’s sister Jessie arrives. She is expected to share a meal with them. Jessie walks in through the front door raising her voice to her sister over the state of the house.

I’m not staying, she says. Annie tells her that she will get John to drive her home.

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Another image comes to the surface. Abigail is about thirteen when she notices

Priscilla’s tangled hair and the dirt embedded in her scalp. Some Brethren sisters were whispering about the dirty state of Number 24 and the lack of personal hygiene evident with the two youngest. Abigail was able to take care of herself, but her brother was not so fussy and he looked a bit ragged at times. As for the little ones, if John didn’t bathe them they stayed as they were.

Abigail experiences a wave of shame as fresh as it was when she heard the church sisters’ whispering floating around her those many years back. It wasn’t fair that two little girls, too young to care for themselves, were being talked about. She spots Annie standing near the hall door seemingly impervious to the gossip. Annie soon catches John’s eye and he helps her to the car where she waits until he is ready to gather the family and drive home.

Rebekah and Priscilla innocently amused themselves amongst the rows of hall chairs. Abigail remembers watching them for a few seconds before taking her sisters by the hand and telling them that it was time to go.

“I need to speak to Mother about Priscilla’s hair,” she tells her father in the carpark as he turns away from the car to go back inside the hall. “It is very dirty and the Brethren are talking. Let’s go.”

Abigail helped John put the girls to bed before she approached Annie. When she told her mother that it was time to wash Priscilla’s hair, Annie silently gazed at her eldest daughter. To break the silence, Abigail suggested that she would help her. Priscilla’s hair was very fine and tangled easily so Abigail offered to comb her hair after it was washed.

“Be very gentle, because I can’t stand the noise if you make her cry,” said Annie.

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The embarrassing Brethren meeting had been the last for the week. Abigail waited until Saturday to drag the bathroom stool over to the wash basin. In the kitchen she boiled a full kettle of water. The bathroom basin was serviced by cold water only. Abigail fetched a towel, shampoo and a cushion for Priscilla to kneel on. She coaxed her sister into having her hair washed with a promise of buying her a sweet. Abigail sang to her as she foamed her hair and massaged her head in a bid to remove the dirt. After the washing, she wrapped

Priscilla’s head in a towel and led her out onto John’s lawn where she sat her sister on the garden seat and gently prised the tangles from her hair. Some of the knots had to be cut out.

…………

Twenty three years later, Rebekah’s voice with its rising tone and hard-edged words mainly directed towards their mother communicated some shared truths that were uncomfortable to hear. Rebekah’s claim that she never knew her mother although she had lived under the same roof as Annie for twenty-one years and her claim that she never felt loved reached a reluctant ear in Abigail. She remembered trying to snuggle up to her mother before being pushed away with the words Please don’t do that. I’m not a cuddly type person. Not that a reluctance to show affection meant that Annie did not love her children. Abigail was anxious to hold onto that premise. Annie did show more in the way of affection for David and Priscilla.

However naughty David was, Annie always made sure that he got a bigger share of ice-cream for his dinner dessert than the rest of them. Little Priscilla used to rock her high chair in the kitchen while Annie was preparing the dinner. The high chair was not designed for rocking but Priscilla managed to keep it in motion without ever tipping over. When

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Priscilla did not get her own way, she held her breath until Annie lifted her onto her knee to calm her.

Abigail’s view that Annie suffered from bouts of depression that at times were very severe now sat as a probability with Rebekah. It was a bit late for Rebekah to go down the path of excusing Annie’s poor parenting and general neglect. Mental illness was not recognised as such in the cult nor to a large extent did the illness find sympathy in the wider world as Rebekah was to discover. She wondered if her father had suspected what was behind Annie’s troubling behaviour. After all, he had spent time in a war veteran’s hospital as an orderly at the end of the Second World War.

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5. Annie

How much easier it would have been for Rebekah to come to terms with her mother’s choice to read rather than keep a clean house had Annie chosen something other than religion. She imagined explaining to friends that while her mother was not house- proud, she was well read in history, fiction, poetry and philosophy. Rebekah would have said these things with a degree of pride. She watched Annie on a daily basis burrow into a corner of the lounge room where she sat in her chair with its back to the lace curtained window.

On her right stood her bookcase that held church ministry delivered by successive

Men of God. These barking tomes were bound in black, navy, dull green and equally dull maroon and sucked the air from the room. Inside their gloomy covers words gathered to form portent utterings that focussed on punishment, Hell, subjection and damnation and fed Annie’s religious fundamentalism.

The backdrop to Annie’s ministry books was her Holy Bible translated from the original languages by J N Darby. The Bible sat with her during breakfast waiting for the family to disperse and prepare for their day. Annie replenished the teapot and transported herself into the worlds of the Old and New Testaments until long after the kitchen had lost its foot traffic and the back door ceased to bang, settling askew against its jamb.

Annie’s reading isolated her. She never attempted to involve her children. At bedtime John took Rebekah and Priscilla to the bathroom and supervised teeth cleaning.

He was the one who carried each child on his shoulders to the sleep-out and tipped them playfully onto their beds. John tucked them in and kissed them goodnight while Annie blended into the walls of number 24.

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At church meetings Annie sat with her ankles crossed and her opened Bible in her lap while The Word of God crashed against her eardrums. Not one to raise her own voice, she received the daily onslaught with equanimity. John told her that he had heard “Rock

Around the Clock” blaring from a shop door as he walked along Rundle Street to the tram stop. Only the other day he had confronted one of the factory girls who arrived at work wearing tight trousers and a top with a low neckline. Annie had clicked her tongue at that one. When he told her that workplace talk discussed the contraceptive pill, her body gave a little shudder. Yes, she thought. God’s Word needs to be heard above the blundering wickedness outside of my gate.

While still at pre-school Rebekah had learnt early and quickly not to bother her mother. She turned to her big sister Abigail for guidance and comfort. On the rare occasion that Rebekah wet her bed, Abigail came to the rescue. She helped her sister change the bedding and drag the mattress outside to lightly hose down in the sun. Soiled laundry was washed and hung on the Hills Hoist. If weather conditions were inclement, Abigail made room in her bed for Rebekah until her sister’s bed was ready to sleep in.

Annie’s preoccupation with a religion shouted in a foreboding tone from the pulpit managed to suffocate any questions from forming. The idea of having fun met Rebekah at the school gates. She loved being with children whose lives were so different from hers and where religion was not discussed. She made friends and joined the yard games of rope skipping, oranges and lemons, hop scotch and monkey bar climbing. She instinctively knew that her school activities were to be kept away from Number 24. The question what did you do today was never asked.

Decades passed before Rebekah could hold a Bible and be able to appreciate the poetic language of Shakespeare’s day. Annie’s Bible had to come off her bookshelf and be

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disentangled from the dull green, maroon, black and navy hard backed church books to flung over the fence and into the street to shake the terrible gloom that covered its words.

It landed on hard ground before testing the spongy surface of freshly cut Saturday grass then wove around colourful beach umbrellas and climbed university campus steps. Then and only then could Rebekah see past the thumping emphasis of doom, and silence the shouting male voices that lifted words from the gilt edged pages to coat in spit before hurling them into the congregation.

John benefited from Annie’s reading at Number 24. One of the conditions of joining The Brethren was the expectation that he would pray publicly and preach at the gospel meetings when asked. Rebekah remembers walking into the kitchen to find both parents sitting at the table. John had been reading something from the morning paper.

When Rebekah’s presence was detected, her father paused until she left the kitchen.

At the time she deduced that her parents were talking about something that they did not wish her to hear and left it at that. Later it dawned on her that maybe her father did not read very well. It was from one of his stories that he told about his entrance test into the army where the admitting sergeant announced You’re an intelligent man but not an educated man that her suspicion was born. Her father repeated this story often with a note of wonderment in his voice. His tone suggested that he felt complimented by the sergeant’s observation and that someone of importance had hit the nail on its head.

She saw the moment in the kitchen anew. She walked in while her father was reading from the daily paper and she had seen him following the words with his finger. The possibility that John was being tutored by Annie came as a shock as Rebekah learnt to read and write in infant and lower primary. The alphabet was painted onto the classroom chalk- board in both upper and lower case. Annie stitched two draw-string bags; one for her

21

letters and one for numbers. It hadn’t occurred to Rebekah that some children missed out on this learning. Years later she began to appreciate what a tragedy her father’s lack of schooling was.

The issue of her father’s level of literacy was not discussed. The secret between her parents went some way towards accounting for their loyalty to each other and the subsequent harmony that existed between them. John gave Annie space to immerse herself in her religious world while she gently and willingly tutored him in reading and understanding The Holy Bible so that he could deliver his preaching obligation with her support. Rebekah now understood the significance of hearing her father’s voice seep beneath the closed bedroom door. He was rehearsing his fast-approaching sermon. With

Annie at his side, the terrifying prospect of being called upon to preach, particularly at the

Sunday Gospel meeting when a lead brother took the first fifteen minutes then called another brother from the congregation to follow suit without preparation, followed by a third, was somewhat alleviated by Annie’s biblical knowledge and the several readings she put together and discussed with him.

Preaching was never an easy task for Rebekah’s dad. Annie’s unflinching support and unquestioned loyalty towards her John spared him from church reprimand, gossip and the humiliation of mumbling to an almost empty hall. With the preaching matter taken care of, John enjoyed full and ongoing employment, fellowship and above all security. It was a life ideally suited to those who didn’t question and who were happy to allow others to dictate the boundaries of what one could or could not do.

Annie in her chair reading her Bible and church ministry while the family tip-toed around her is an enduring image that Rebekah carries of her mother. Out of reach for most of the time in the little square house at Number 24, Annie’s lack of presence represented a

22

first sketch or a mysterious outline in a family line-up. Her indifference to others with the exception of John ensured that she remained a stranger to Rebekah. Annie wasn’t a scrap interested in other people’s lives, their ideas, how they presented themselves or how she might meet them halfway. The baker making his daily visit to the Bentley back door after running the gauntlet of the family’s terrier Pat flinging himself into a frenzy of heel biting and barking, would call Baker! before Annie appeared.

“Hello Baker,” she’d say. “It will be one loaf and six lunch rolls, today.”

Then out of the blue she might change her order. “Yeast today, Baker. What do you have?”

Red-faced and perspiring with Pat ready to continue the game from his crouching position, the baker returned to his van with a delighted Pat snapping at his heels. Annie stood at the door with her gaze fixed on the gate for his return. The order in her arms, she retreated inside leaving the baker swiping the air while the terrier expertly dodged his bread basket and booted foot on his way out.

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6. Number 24

‘Inside’ was where Annie Bentley created her world. Number 24 was built by the

State Bank for returned servicemen after WW2. Securing a State Bank home loan meant a low interest rate and an affordable payment plan. It offered John Bentley an opportunity to leave the rental market behind and to embrace home ownership for the first time. Number

24 was the length of Anzac Highway – about seven to eight kilometres - away from the prying eyes of other Brethren. The house on a corner acre block was new when John and

Annie took occupancy and moved their young family in. David was 11, Abigail 10,

Rebekah 3 and Priscilla 2.

John set to work creating a front garden of fence roses, lawn and shrubs and an extensive vegetable garden at the back. He built a sleep-out to accommodate the three girls, a garden shed and an asbestos garage that opened onto the street. Annie stayed inside weaving her way around furniture that she left him to arrange.

During the week he went to work while she stayed at home. David and Abigail went to school and for the most part Rebekah amused herself as Priscilla was often cared for by family friends when Annie announced that she couldn’t cope. John did the asking, dropping off and collecting. During these periods Annie closed herself away in her bedroom. Rebekah wandered about outside turning on the garden tap to make mud, floating matchboxes in the water trenches that surrounded the fruit trees, making snails curl into their shells and stripping leaves. Inside the square house Annie occasionally emerged from her room to drag the Hoover over the floor rugs and sweep the kitchen floor.

On Monday mornings the laundry copper was filled and heated and sheets from the matrimonial bed together with the sheets off one of the sibling’s beds were lifted from the boiling water by a stick then put through a hand wringer before being pegged on the Hills

24

Hoist to dry. Annie did one wash then towards the end of the day when John was due in from work, she changed her dress and brushed her hair before seeing to the evening meal.

Work day over, John entered Number 24 through the back door. Annie gave him her full attention. John dear, I hope your day went well, she would say in her soft Scots lilt. She stood with a fresh apron covering her better dress and her recently brushed hair coiled into a bun at the nape of her neck. Gravy dripped down cupboard doors, Jimmy the budgie chirped in his cage with his excrement raining onto the floor below and a layer of grease anchored the dust on cluttered surfaces.

At sixteen, Abigail helped a distressed nine-year-old Rebekah work the copper because she wanted to be clean but didn’t know how to wash her bed sheets. Abigail bought fresh linen and towels to replace the patched linen and threadbare towels. Things about the house began to further improve when Abigail worked with their father to repaint and upgrade the kitchen. The old cage that housed Jimmy was replaced by a smaller one.

With the new cage a cleaning roster was set up that didn’t include their mother.

At the end of her primary school day, Rebekah entered the back door calling I’m home! Sometimes her mother’s voice responded, at other times there was nothing. This was when Rebekah discovered a shopping list and her mother’s purse on the kitchen table.

Annie was behind her closed bedroom door possibly having a nap.

Annie Bentley didn’t mean much to other people because she was rarely seen.

Neighbourhood kids taunted the young Rebekah about the witch that lived in her house.

When Rebekah protested that it was her mother they were talking about and that she had a mother just like everyone else, Trevor Hutchinson put her straight.

“You ain’t like us,” Trevor said. “None of us has a witch inside. We’re normal!”

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When Queen Elizabeth 11 visited Adelaide in 1954, a note went home from school.

It requested that Dear Mrs Bentley provide her daughter Rebekah with a mat to sit on during the ceremony which was to be held at the Wayville Showgrounds. The Singer sewing machine was placed on the dining room table and a mat was produced. The finished article was waiting on the breakfast table the next day. At school, the others proudly showed off their mats. Lesley Upton’s was designed in a heart shape with a pink frilled edge. At the centre the words I love you were appliqued in a pretty flowered fabric on a cream background.

Miss Wade slowly walked between the desks admiring the mats proudly displayed by the class. She asked for Rebekah’s mat waiting while she reluctantly opened the lid of her desk before pulling out her plastic covered newspaper mat. The edge was identified by an inner row of stitching that replicated the square. Rebekah braced herself for an outpouring of scorn. Instead Miss Wade held the mat high.

“This is what I call a mat designed to suit our purposes,” Miss Wade announced.

“See girls! Mrs. Bentley has anticipated damp grass. The plastic will prevent moisture from penetrating the mat and the newspaper is an excellent insulator. Rebekah, tell your mother Well done!”

The practicality of a mat that attracted praise was not enough to counterbalance the other. What hurt Rebekah the most was her mother’s indifference to her school day. She began forging her mother’s signature on school reports after watching her uninterested parent scribble her name on the line without bothering to read the report. It was neither here nor there whether Rebekah went to school as long as she didn’t interrupt Annie’s day.

On the rare occasion that her mother showed that perhaps she did care, the memory sat uneasily with Rebekah. Such an instance was not sufficient for Rebekah to begin filling

26

in her mother’s outline. The memory hung precariously like an unpegged cotton handkerchief on a Hills Hoist. A ten-year-old Rebekah cut her leg open when the wheels of her go-cart ran into a boggy watering trench beneath the nectarine tree. She gathered speed on a cemented surface that carried her across the lawn to come to an abrupt halt in the trench. The impact flung her into the near distance.

The leg wound needed stitching. The family’s Brethren GP arrived and John placed a sheet and a pillow on the dining room table before lifting Rebekah onto the makeshift operating table. A plastic bowl was placed over her nose and liquid from a brown bottle was fed in from the side. Then nothing. Rebekah slept for fourteen hours. When she awoke, she found her mother hovering anxiously.

“Hello dear!” Annie said in her soft voice. “I’m pleased that you have woken up.

You have been asleep for a long time.”

Rebekah was in her parents’ bed. Placed there after the surgery on her knee, she had slept the night between them. Now that Rebekah was awake her mother fetched the shoe box that held some family photos. It was either that or a black covered lined book that had a few recipes written in her mother’s handwriting which the sick child was allowed to use as a colouring in book. Rebekah chose the photographs.

A sepia photograph showing her mother standing on the University Bridge arrested her attention. A pram wheel was just visible in the left corner on the river bank. The pram to which the wheel was attached presumably held Rebekah or Priscilla or perhaps both. Am

I in the pram? Who took the photo? These questions to her mother slid from the pram to the figure standing on the bridge. It’s a horrible picture, Annie said. Look at the way my hat is pulled over my face, then as an afterthought, Put it away dear. It was a very unhappy time.

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Rebekah was left to create her own story. She was in the pram that her mother did not see. Mr. Manning would have taken the photograph. He and Mrs. Manning were childless and often cared for Rebekah and her youngest sister Priscilla when they were little. For the first five years of her life Rebekah hardly saw her sister as she was away at the Mannings’. The just-visible pram wheel held the source of Annie’s unhappiness. It was

Rebekah and her sister who made their mother sad. She wished that great friend in the sky had not chosen her to be their mother.

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7. Recurring Dreams

Since her father’s death, her visit home and her mother’s death, Rebekah often hears the Glenelg tram making its way along a line that she knew so well. The sound reaches her ears when she lies in bed waiting to drift off to sleep. It takes her to her secret homes, particularly to Number 24. Before the family owned a car, John’s Brethren boss allowed him the use of one of the business cars. However in the early 1950s while Mr.

Tanner’s business was being established, the Bentley family relied on either the generosity of a church car owner to collect them from Number 24 or they used the Glenelg tram to transport them to church. When the tram was the only option available to get them to church, Annie elected to stay at home.

The sound of the tram, which had lain dormant in Rebekah’s consciousness for the best part of two decades, took her to the Glenelg terminal where the conductor flicked the seat backs in readiness for the return journey to the city. She heard the movement of people boarding, the clang of a bell to indicate that the tram was about to leave and the conductor’s ticket punch clicking a hole through the final stop number on the ticket that the passenger had paid for.

A vision of the Lamson Cash Carrier used in a Jetty Road store called Ryans often drifted into her dreams. The store cashier sat in a glass box perched up high to receive the cash carrier’s network of lines which were strung at ceiling height. The cash carrier wires blended or became the voltage wires that drove the tram juxtaposing the two images.

Rebekah balanced perilously on the tram roof reaching for the money trolley as it slid along the tram wires. When she couldn’t find the wooden handle to propel the trolley onwards she invariably awoke drenched in her own sweat.

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The tram separated from the cash carrier to become the focal point of her dreams.

The old anxiety that she might be seen by her class mates boarding the tram with Abigail as the two went into the city to shop on a Saturday morning returned. It was the way she was forced to dress that made her stomach knot. Rebekah stopped taking the risk of being seen and ordered her clothes over the telephone from clothing advertisements that she saw in the morning paper. They arrived at Number 24 by mail.

Decades later her dreams take her to the Glengowrie tram stop. She sees the tram’s approach shimmering on the rails. It stops and she is about to climb aboard when the tram shrinks to a toy size and she is left standing at the side of the line. At other times she boards the tram and finds a seat only to find that she is naked. She awakes, hot and shaken, relieved to find that she is in her bed.

These dreams don’t peel away from her like most dreams do. They push into her consciousness as she goes about her day. The sound of the Glenelg tram acts as a conduit through which memories of her earlier life are being forced upon her. She tries stuffing her ears with cotton wool only to find that the tram dreams haven’t finished with her and they have greater force.

The tram morphs into several houses that reflect the many houses she and Richard lived in during the first years of their marriage. Moving house would chase away

Rebekah’s anxiety attacks, frequent heavy chest colds and her self-doubts that centred on motherhood. One big home has a basement filled with statues. First she must clean a bathroom at the far corner of the house. She hunts for a blue bucket. Her hunting takes her onto the street. The sun is high in the sky. She is frantic in her dressing gown.

Another house has an unsecured back door and windows with missing locks.

Rebekah is house bound sitting rigid in her front room listening for intruders. She knows

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there is a life outside of her window but she cannot be a part of it because of the security risks her home presents.

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8. David

Rebekah clears a spot on John’s work bench for about a dozen empty milk bottles.

A stack of grapevine leaves sits close by. Jack the milky has turned up ringing his bicycle bell. He hands over an empty milk caddy with an order punched in code through a vine leaf. Rebekah fills the caddy with bottles and issues Jack with a fresh vine leaf. Jack continues on his round while Rebekah records the takings.

The game continues until Annie rings her bell, calling Rebekah and Priscilla

(who’s no longer Jack) inside. Hours of play during which several matchboxes have been dismantled to become boats that float on a mud trench filled with water, where paint tin lids have been transformed into café plates, where stripped plant foliage decorates mud cakes and jam tins have been turned into stilts, give way to an uncompromising adult world.

At the dinner table John recounts an incident that took place while he was waiting for a neighbour to drive him into the city. He was waiting in Mr. Richardson’s driveway with other neighbours who were part of a car pool.

“This morning I was forced to speak up about the evils of smoking,” John began.

“While we were waiting for Mr. Richardson to come out, Mr. Marks lit a cigarette. It was my duty to speak up and I did. I told Mr. Marks that I too once smoked but then I found

God. He taught me that even being in the presence of someone smoking makes us chosen

Christians unfit to partake of the Holy Spirit’s presence at The Lord’s Supper so I asked him to butt out his cigarette.”

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David, who was fourteen and fed up with the whole religious spiel, laughed scornfully. “It’s not your home and it’s not your business, dad! If I were Mr. Marks I would tell you to butt out.”

At the tender age of six, Rebekah knew that there was something a bit off with her father lecturing the neighbours about what they should do and what was not allowed in his presence. Furthermore, Helen Richardson was her friend. Rebekah liked to think that

Helen thought that her family was normal. At least one parent spent her life indoors shunning contact with the everyday world, thus inadvertently sparing Rebekah from another source of embarrassing lectures that had the unhappy habit of reaching the school playground.

David laughed at John’s stories of righteous indignation, and appeared to do so without offence. John took David’s banter in good humour in an effort to stave off the inevitable friction that now hovered over their relationship.

David refused to pray with his father at the dinner table. He refused to make a formal commitment to The Brethren’s agenda known as “breaking bread”. When David heard his Brethren friend Peter giving his commitment, he felt betrayed.

“Peter told me he’d never join up,” a deflated David told his family as they drove homewards from the meeting during which Peter’s name was put forward and accepted.

His friend’s decision meant the end of their friendship unless David did the same.

“Just give yourself up to the Lord,” suggested John.

“Forget it,” returned her brother.

About this time John and Annie learned that David had joined his school’s cricket team.

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“Son, you know that your mother and I don’t approve of school sport outside of

Physical Education lessons,” John began.

“Of course you don’t,” replied David. “You don’t like anything I want to do.”

“You’ve been raised a Brethren. That is your rightful place. Why do you continue to do the wrong thing?”

“I like my school friends better. They’re not weird like The Brethren are and we have a good team going,” retorted David.

Annie sat quietly and Abigail’s eyes fixed on her plate. Rebekah heard her big brother’s words fall onto the dinner table where they laid scattered before being swept away by the dish cloth. When John announced that it was time for family prayer, David rose quietly, thanked Annie for his dinner, leaving the kitchen before his kneeling father beseeched the Lord to help his boy find the Light.

David never raised his voice and nor did he ask anything of John and Annie. Early on a Saturday morning, he would emerge from his room dressed in his school uniform

(these doubled as his casual clothes) to announce that he was off to cricket practice. Did he borrow appropriate footwear or did he play in his school shoes? Rebekah imagined her sports talented brother dashing about the cricket pitch in his school uniform perhaps wearing borrowed footwear or settling for bare feet and being entirely dependent on school supplies for cricket paraphernalia. Only now, decades later, Rebekah is in a position to ask these questions without an immense rage enveloping her. David made do as they all did.

This was not only because John and Annie were Brethren and would not support anything outside of their church but it was more because of who they were. Both John and Annie were conditioned by grinding poverty. Their needs were very simple and they

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unhesitatingly put those before the needs of their children. Her brother on the other hand showed an impressive understanding of what he was dealing with and set his course with a steely determination to make a life for himself.

…….

1959. Rebekah is in her last year of primary school. Television had arrived in

Adelaide and it seemed as if every girl in her class had access to a set. Until now, Rebekah managed to move with relative ease from the religious bubble of her home to her preferred world of school. Television changed that and she lived in fearful anticipation of a widening gap between the two worlds.

David is a door clicking shut, the toilet chain being pulled and the extra shower being run. He is the wayward brother whose dinner is served separately from the rest of the family and whose ghostly presence is detected by the large scoop of ice cream missing from the Amscol brick.

He switched from cricket to motorbike racing at Rowley Park Speedway. John was alerted when the Royal Adelaide Hospital rang to say that his son was in hospital with a broken arm. John grabbed his car keys and was on his way to the hospital. On their return,

David passed sheepishly through the kitchen with his arm plastered and in a sling while

John rushed to the telephone muttering, I’ll give that Kym Bonython a piece of my mind.

By and by the story tumbled out, albeit with large gaps that were never filled.

David had been allowed to ride at Rowley Park despite him being underage. This was viewed by John as a deliberate act of sabotage by the administrators of the Speedway to take David away from his family. That David had lied about his age didn’t score a mention. John pushed the blame of his son’s demise wholly onto Kym Bonython. It was

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the Devil’s work and now David was smitten with racing. It’s in his blood now, John would say, sadly shaking his head at the helpless situation he, as a father, found himself in.

The old question fired at David on a regular basis was What’s it going to be Son? Is it going to be the Right path or the Wrong one? was dropped. David wasn’t listening.

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9. Plumbago

The Right path has the rest of the family rushing to the bathroom for a flannel swish and teeth cleaning before climbing into the FE Holden to take them to the Monday night prayer meeting. John stopped the car just inside the double gates of the Laught

Avenue Hall grounds to allow Annie and her daughters close access to the hall entrance.

Abigail, Rebekah and Priscilla fell in behind Annie in single file to pass through the second door and into the hall to their seat row while John parked the car at the back. At precisely 7.30pm the hall door was locked and the first brother to pray was on his feet.

Rebekah gave the fifteen brothers present three minutes each and calculated that they would be out of the place within the hour. As various male voices droned on, she watched the minute hand on the clock. Two one minute prayers included her father’s, four two minute prayers and nine more to go.

A thick, black casing frames a white clock face inscribed with Roman numerals.

The minute hand jumps its way to the hour as if prodded by a Brethren brother who is covertly wired to the time piece. The brothers’ pit is a place of secrets: of unseen glances, nods, keys, power and ambition. Nothing is left to chance. Before each meeting a brother synchronises the clock with several time pieces from the pit.

In the highly controlled hall environment, the blank wall on which the clock hangs refuses Rebekah’s attempt to project clusters of blue. These are the glorious blue hues of the Plumbago flower whose bush grows untidily in a dusty patch beside the hall’s gates. Its long tendrils poke high above the bush canopy reaching towards the summer sky. They wave gently as she passes through the open hall gates before they are padlocked against the outside world.

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Inside the hall, the blue clusters hover in her consciousness as a faint replica of their reality, as shifting shapes on her peripheral vision moving to a rhythm outside of her reach. She snaps her eyes closed to capture their shape and colour opening on a spring to throw them against the wall where the fading images of blue disappear behind the jumping clock.

……………

At the beginning of her final year in primary school, Rebekah auditioned for a place in the school choir and was chosen. She practised once a week after school. As the year drew to a close the choir began a twice-weekly practice in preparation for an end of the year concert. They planned to sing for elderly people in a nursing home. Annie had barely noticed her daughter’s late home coming. If Priscilla had gone to the shop for ice- cream and anything else that might be on the shopping list, Rebekah was left alone.

The concert was only five nights away and her class teacher was calling for permission slips to be returned immediately. If it was only a parental signature required

Rebekah would have taken care of that matter weeks ago. It was the request for a white dress to be worn to the concert that held up the return of the permission slip. As time was running out, Rebekah decided to announce her dilemma at the dinner table. She launched without warning.

“I need a white dress for my school’s choir concert which is on Friday night. Red capes will be supplied to keep us warm. Also I need a ride there and back,” Rebekah said while flattening the permission slip on the table.

Annie squared her shoulders.

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“Eh?” said John looking bewildered. “What concert? Annie do you know anything about this?”

“Of course I don’t, John. It’s out of the question.”

“Why do you think I’ve been late home each week for the past year? It’s not my fault that you didn’t notice,” Rebekah whined.

“Singing at a school concert is out of the question,” John said. “You heard your mother, Rebekah. There will be no concert.”

Rebekah felt something akin to a large wave rolling towards her. She had to either ride it or dive under otherwise she might well be flattened. She lurched forward then stood up facing the table while she used her left leg to kick her chair out of her way.

“I am going to the school concert,” she shouted. “I want to be with my school friends and you are not going to stop me. You’ve never allowed me to have fun. I don’t want your stupid life. Do you hear?”

…………

Later that evening Rebekah left her sleep-out to use the toilet. As she stepped onto the back verandah, her unseen brother emerged from the kitchen.

“Don’t let them rule you, Min,” he said before vanishing into the night air.

…….

Before the evening was out, John appeared at her bedroom door.

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“Your mother and I have decided to allow you to go to the concert this once,” he began. “There will be no white dress and you are not to join the school choir at Brighton

High next year.”

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10. Fitting In

Abigail stepped onto the grass court for the last time. She wore her Volley sandshoes and her knee length pleated tennis skirt. At the court gate with her hand on the bolt she became a statue frozen in time, halted on the thresh-hold of what was. The lawn surface wore two weeks of summer growth that left a faint impression of the sharp chalk lines that she was used to. The net hadn’t been rolled out either.

She hadn’t grasped the urgency demanded of the new church leader’s orders. The edict that announced sport as part of Satan’s enticements therefore no more reached her ears at the Wednesday evening Reading Meeting. The words faded behind a sharp and satisfying crack of the ball meeting her racquet. She felt her body turn to drive the ball low and hard over the net to land on the baseline at her opponent’s scrambling feet. There would be one more game. She would be prepared and she would throw herself into it in order to say goodbye on a high note.

The words her friends heard demanded right of way. They ran ahead of picture making, stomping over the imagination before it had a chance to compete which is why they now gathered around a four gallon drum furnace. Abigail saw a flame dart above its surface; red, yellow and trailing blue smoke. Then she heard a male voice call Right. Let’s do it! Covers were removed from racquets which in turn were flung onto the burning pyre.

The flames stood up, fanned by the added fuel and the draughts caused by the pummelling of chest and foot stamping.

Satan! Satan! Satan! they chanted while flinging in racquet covers and racquet presses. Next someone tossed in a wooden bench and then the tennis net followed.

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Abigail stood motionless clutching her racquet to her chest. Someone began to wrestle her racquet from her. C’mon—it’s no use to you now!

“I’m not ready,” she said.

She glanced back at the court wanting to recapture the freshly mown and lined surface with the taut net measured and ready for play. It was time that she needed. A gradual fading out of what was. Maybe it was the shock of finding herself out of step with her friends that got in the way of her thought processing. She could only manage a fleeting revival of her past innocence before it retreated beneath the burden of a fresh reality.

Clutching her racquet, she began to appreciate the futility of her gesture. Her racquet was of no use to her now.

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11. A Day Unfolds

At Number 24, John’s days rolled out in a predictable pattern. The dawn sky was a soft pink when the milkman’s van turned into McGilp Avenue. It stopped about a hundred metres along the road where the milky, dressed in shorts and runners left the engine humming. He drew back the plastic flap covering filled milk bottles and stacked a caddy with a dozen. With the other hand he lifted a full metal can of milk off his truck and jogged his weight-bearing load to a house verandah. The clatter of glass knocking against glass aroused sleeping dogs whose ears pricked sharply into the still air and twitched. A dog’s bark was quickly followed by a distant rejoinder. Milk was either poured into a waiting billy can or empty milk bottles were replaced by foil sealed bottles full of creamy milk. Sometimes a hand written note sat beneath the billy can or the milk caddy: Dear

Milky, Just four today, Thank you OR…. Milky—guests staying so it will be six bottles.

Yours Truly, Ralph Muir. The milkman paused as he sorted payment, delving into his leather pouch that was slung diagonally from shoulder to hip for loose change. Then it was back in the driver’s seat of his van to inch his way along the street.

Soon another delivery van appeared. This one carried its payload of daily papers.

The Holden FJ panel van advanced slowly along the street while its driver expertly threw tightly rolled papers left and right from his vehicle window.

John heard the pre-dawn sounds and understood their narrative from his side of the marital bed at Number 24. As The Advertiser landed with a thud on his lawn, he slung his feet over the side of the bed reaching for his gown. Invariably he had not slept well due to blocked sinuses which accounted for the mountain of pillows used to raise his head and shoulders in an attempt to get some sleep. A jar of Vicks Vaporub sat on a chair next to his and Annie’s bed. John reached down for the jar and tightened its lid before slipping the

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decongestant ointment into his dressing gown’s pocket. With another hand he lifted the chair and carried it quietly into the kitchen.

In the kitchen he filled the kettle and placed it on the stove, using a flint to light the gas ring. The kettle heating, John made his way to the front door. The sun had risen when he stepped out. Its emerging rays highlighted the brickwork on the house walls while throwing a glistening freshness over the lawn and shrubs. There had been good rain during the night accompanied by lightning and thunder. John predicted that the storm had vented its fury to the north. It was a long way away as the lightning flashed in sheets through their window and the rolling thunder kept to an even pitch. The storm-clouded sky had dissipated by dawn to reveal a changing canvas of pinks and blue.

The paper hadn’t lain on the wet grass long enough for the ground moisture to penetrate. John whacked it a couple of times against his thigh, continuing to flick it to and fro while gazing towards the eastern sky. Catching the dawn had been part of his day since his time in Alice Springs during the War years. The promise of full and ongoing employment led to an expansion of his world. He relished the quiet early morning routine of spending a few moments admiring nature’s handiwork.

The hardships he and his siblings endured during The Depression when there wasn’t enough money to provide the essentials were never far from his consciousness. The roof on the family’s rented dwelling leaked profusely; eleven siblings were crammed together in two bedrooms, their clothing patched and thin. The eldest, John felt an impossible burden placed on his young shoulders from an expectation that he would take his father’s place as the bread winner. He faced each day barely noticing the world outside of the family door. The uncertainty with which he was forced to grapple on a daily basis filled him with dread whenever he stepped out. John came away from this experience

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deeply shaken. He and Annie moved away from the West End with John vowing never to venture down its streets again.

During the early years of Australia’s involvement in WW2, he was stationed at

Keswick Army Barracks. In 1942 when the War threatened Australia, he moved with the

Citizen Military Force to Number 9 Australian Staging Camp in Alice Springs. He worked in the mess hut kitchen as a cook. The camp was busy with men arriving and departing for a further four hour journey to Darwin where some volunteered to take up service in New

Guinea. As the war threat to Australia intensified, John sought and was granted non- combatant duties on religious grounds. He was assured of staying in Alice Springs for the duration of the war which suited him. He felt safe in an inland Australian environment where desert met sky on a vast horizon and where everyone had a job to do and the better educated gave orders.

Dawn watching became a daily activity. On a clear morning, the rising sun bathed the Macdonnell Ranges in an orange glow. Above the magical orange of these ancient hills lay a deep blue sky that gathered the willing eye into its embrace and nourished the soul.

The cool morning air anchored him. He savoured the dawn beauty both as an end in itself and also as a comforting reminder that there were some things that are constant. The

Outback whispered its assurances from the red, brown, grey green and blue landscape into a gentle swirl of air that arched and straightened with the words This ancient land is

Australia’s heart. It is a part of you and you are a part of it.

At Number 24, John rescued the boiling kettle and poured Annie’s tea which he took to her bedside. In the kitchen he unfurled the paper. With tea poured, he sat at the table and scanned its pages. When Annie joined him to set the breakfast table, John folded the paper and rose to call the girls. He knocked on Abigail’s door first then listened for a

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response before calling Rebekah and Priscilla. At 7am, the family were at the breakfast table.

A green checked cloth covered the table and five places were laid. David was under

Brethren discipline because he refused to be one of them and his breakfast was served separately at 7.30am. At the 7am table John gave thanks to the Almighty before two racks of toast emptied onto plates to be spread with vegemite or jam. Annie poured the tea. At

7.20am John signalled time for prayers. The three girls knelt beside their chair and used the tablecloth drop to cover their head while John prayed to God for His mercy and care.

During his prayer, Annie sat in her chair as her arthritis did not allow kneeling. She covered her head with a tea towel that was usually stiff and stained from wiping and mopping as it travelled from the sink to the stove.

After breakfast the family dispersed. Rebekah tightened the belt of her bottle green school tunic, running her hands across the six box pleats: three at the front and three at the back, checking that they were defined with crisp edges. In the kitchen she layered cheese on a slice of buttered bread, sliced a tomato which she wrapped in grease proof paper to lay on the cheese later. A slice of fruit cake and an apple were placed with the sandwich in her plastic lunchbox and stowed in her satchel along with her drink bottle.

She wheeled her bike from the shed and up-ended her satchel into the front basket, leaving the house yard through the side gate. Her route took her down Hardy Street past the newer houses where she used to stop daily on her way home from Glenelg Primary to check the build from foundations to completion. What she saw astounded her. A fish tank built into a lounge room wall. A press button flush toilet in its own space adjacent to the bathroom or fitted into the bathroom. Glamorous bathrooms they were with a matching toilet, bath and wash basin in pale pink, blue, mauve or soft green. A kitchen fitted with

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laminated bench tops and aluminium supports suspended a glass fronted row of cupboards plugged into the wall. In one house she saw a wall of slate slabs piled on top of each other to make a feature wall in the lounge room. Although these houses were now occupied,

Rebekah had been there from the beginning. She remembered the vacant land full of marshmallow weed, soursobs and Salvation Jane. She watched the cement foundations being poured and the electrical wiring threaded down the wall cavities and knew what others didn’t see.

Once over Diagonal Road, that sense of knowing changed. Houses brushed past her peripheral vision as she sped towards her friend Peggy’s house. She drew up outside her gate and rang her bicycle bell.

“How did you go with last night’s storm?” Peggy asked as they road side by side along Brighton Road.

“It was fun watching TV in the dark,” replied Rebekah.

“Whoa!!” exclaimed Peggy as she dodged a pot hole. “How did you do that when there was no electricity?”

Oops!

“Our lights went out first then the appliances,” Rebekah told Peggy in a desperate attempt to pull the plug on the imaginary television story that was going nowhere and return to the storm itself.

“Thunder terrifies me!” she added. “I hate noise.”

“Well thunder is the sound that the heat from lightning causes. Both light and sound happen at the same time but the light of lightning goes faster than the sound of

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thunder. Every five seconds between lightning and thunder places the storm one mile away. So all you have to do is to count the seconds between a flash of lightning and the noise of thunder then divide by five to get the storm’s distance from you.” Peggy explained. “My mum told me.”

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12. A Misfit

In her first year of high school, Rebekah snuck out of Number 24 one Saturday afternoon and joined her school friends at Glenelg Oval where a football match was playing. At the oval gates her friends joined with a group of boys. Rebekah felt uneasy.

She did not know how to speak to boys, let alone flirt, and she was aware of her old- fashioned dress and uncut hair.

She had given a lot of thought to what she would wear and had managed to stretch her pale pink sweater by hanging it wet on the Hills Hoist and anchoring the edge with house bricks. She wore a skirt, as trousers for women were not allowed in her parents’ world. Her hair hung loosely down her back. The skirt was a huge fashion faux pas. She converted her jumper into a Sloppy Jo which at least gave a hint that she was a fashion conscious girl. When she caught up with her friends, none of them stared or commented on how she looked so she thought she had done pretty well in her circumstances. She knows now that her friends all knew that she came from a whacky religious family and for the most part they felt sorry for her.

On the day of her escape she changed her clothing behind John’s garage then scaled the house fence. When she was two streets away from Number 24 the fear of being discovered faded away. By now, the hum of the football crowd drew her towards the oval.

The Glenelg Football oval stands next to her old school but despite its familiarity as a landmark, as soon as she entered its gates the ground rose up presenting a steep climb while the spectators merged into fuzzy blobs. Rebekah found a white picket fence surrounding the oval and clung to it. Fortunately her friends were too busy flirting to notice her odd behaviour. She stood attached to the fence forcing herself to try to make sense of the game in an effort to stop her mind from playing tricks. The noise stopped and

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she was enveloped in a world of silence. She knew this wasn’t real. She had to get out of there. With all of her energy concentrated on moving towards the gates, she resorted to counting her steps and urging herself onwards. One step, two steps, three steps…and soon the worst would be over.

On familiar territory, the world continued its silence as she walked past her school and along Diagonal Road. Another source of anxiety engulfed. There would be consequences awaiting her at Number 24. She saw her family heading towards the car while she walked towards the oval. She saw John returning to the house to look for her.

Time was against him. He abandoned his search and drove to the meeting where

Rebekah’s absence was noticed as her family made their way inside the hall. John braced himself for the inevitable questions and once again he would be reminded of his ineptness as a household head.

At home Rebekah expected to be told how disappointed her parents were with her.

Her sisters distanced themselves for her lack of parental consideration and she might be denied the evening meal. She may be forced to remain in her bedroom until she learnt by heart a passage of Scripture. Brethren sisters would keep their distance as by now Rebekah was marked as “rebellious”.

Rebekah entered through the side gate of Number 24 then headed for the sleep out where she flopped onto her bed, knees drawn up and facing the wall. The family were not back from the meeting. Rebekah had time to reflect on the disaster that her afternoon had been. Tears slid onto her pillow. She had not anticipated the widening gap between her home life and the world outside. School was beginning to be intolerable as television, concerts, hairdressers, fashion and music presented as a foreign language. On Monday morning she would have to explain to her friends why she had suddenly vanished.

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She heard the noise of family return. It wasn’t long before the door of her sleep-out opened and John entered. Rebekah was lying on her bed facing the wall. She didn’t see that her father held something in his hand. His silence made her turn her head and it was then that she saw her dad’s webbing belt fling upwards then arch its way towards her. The sharp sting on her bare legs brought her to her feet.

“Get out!” she screamed. “I hate you.”

John was about to inflict another blow when he changed his mind and abruptly left the sleep-out.

The incident marked a turning point for Rebekah. John’s army webbing belt hung from a hook on the inside of the parental bedroom door. The family knew it as ‘the strap’ and accepted its presence as a part of Brethren paraphernalia but as far as Rebekah knew,

John’s strap had never been used. She saw her father abort his intended thrashing when she stood up to him and realised that he was doing something out of character. There was no doubt in her mind that he had been ordered to thrash some sense into her. If the incident stayed at that level then perhaps she would have allowed it to pass. But there was something more.

John didn’t allow her to have fun and now he had hurt her. He who had smoked cigarettes, attended dances, participated in the boxing ring (this was mentioned once) and knew the ways of the world that she was denied loomed huge as an example of hypocrisy.

He wasn’t her friend and from that day onwards she had little to say to him.

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13. “Put Your Boy on the Street”

David was never a victim to the unforgiving religious cult into which he was born.

He decided early that what his parents had in mind for him was not what he wanted. He refused to follow John in prayer at the meals table and he refused to go to the meetings.

Rebekah heard John and Annie describe his rebellion as downright selfishness. She heard them say that Brethrenism was his birthright. She heard her father reflect on his role as a parent. Perhaps he should not have slowed the car at his young son’s request to tail a semi -trailer for miles. As a Brethren parent he should not have picked up David’s intricate sketches of the semi- trailers to admire them. John berated himself for being too soft in allowing his son to spend so much time observing and imitating the world outside of the

Brethren bubble rather than putting his foot down and directing David towards the path of righteousness. He had given his son the space to play into the Devil’s hands.

John’s words hung in the air at the square house. David slipped quietly through the kitchen and into his room of an evening. His meals were served separately from the rest of the family and he deposited his fortnightly board money on the kitchen table at Annie’s place setting. David quickly adjusted to this new way of living at Number 24. Simply adjusting to the new meal time arrangement and being prompt about his board money was not what John and Annie were after. It wasn’t long before the order came. Put your boy on the street, Mr. Bentley.

An older Rebekah hears the words and identifies the speaker in an instant. Rows of empty grey vinyl covered chairs form an unstable backdrop to the order. Time has passed yet of that past some things have endured the shifting nature of memory. In a flash,

Rebekah is her twelve year old self following her family to their car. As soon as the

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meeting is over and the hall doors unlocked, the family leave promptly as expected. John escorts Annie across the road to where the car is parked. They drive silently homeward.

As the FE Holden settles into cruising speed Rebekah cranes her neck against the car window to look skywards. A canopy of navy rises above street lighting that smudges the sky making it difficult to determine if rain clouds hover. Her brother without a name spends the night in his second hand hospital bed that has been wheeled onto the footpath just outside of Number 24.

Rebekah willingly surrenders one of her better blankets to keep him warm. Before the family reach the square house, she has ripped the shower curtain from its bathroom rod to spread on the moving bed in case it rains.

The car lurches to a halt as John drives it onto the unpaved footpath then cuts the engine. Car doors fling open and the returning family file silently through the side gate to the back door as if the car’s resting spot is normal. The words Why here dad? Why not in the garage? gather inside Rebekah’s mouth, which opens slightly, then snaps closed, trapping the unsaid words. Very quickly the moving bed loses its wheels and the trusty FE

Holden sharpens its fins and rises higher on its axle. It is not finished with the night. She sees it vanishing into the night air with her no name brother sitting in Annie’s front passenger seat watching a dimly lit landscape slide by.

Inside Number 24, the family disperse with Rebekah and Priscilla quickly and silently undressing for bed. In the blackened sleepout Rebekah hears her father’s voice as he emerges from the parental bedroom.

“Are you there son? You need to pack your things as you can no longer stay here.”

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John’s voice is accompanied by his knocking on David’s door. A muffled response from behind the door has Rebekah kneeling on her bed beneath the open bathroom window to catch voices. She presses an ear against the wire window screen to hear her father’s telephone voice. He is speaking with Alice, a name Rebekah recognises from one of John’s stories as belonging to a natural sister she has not met. To the listening ear, Alice is a name pulled into Number 24 by a telephone wire that branches away from street posts to attach to a house wall beneath their roof then secretly snakes its way along wall cavities to emerge as a black Bakelite receiver into which John speaks with urgency.

“He’s got to go. Now! Will you take him, Alice?”

In another part of Adelaide Alice has agreed to take the ghost brother. Rebekah hears her father almost whispering his gratitude. She strains at the window to hear his words Thank you dear Alice, thank you. Simultaneously, the handpiece clicks onto the telephone receiver and Rebekah dives away from the window onto her bed where she awaits her father’s next move.

It is not long before footsteps reach the listening sleep-out and then onto the cement path outside. Rebekah is now on the other side of her room carefully adjusting the louvre lever to allow her eyes a space to follow the footsteps. She catches a glimpse of

David holding John’s old kitbag. The gate clicks shut followed by two car doors then the

FE Holden’s engine fires into life and the car accelerates away.

Priscilla remained silent and still during the unfolding drama. She was a hump swaddled in bedclothes, a listening hump quietly processing voice tones and movement until silence reclaimed the night. Her familiar rocking began. Up went her free arm to swing in time with her body as it rocked its way towards the blissful stages of early sleep.

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Under her bedclothes Rebekah imagines sneaking back to the car instead of getting undressed for bed. She hides in the floor well behind John’s driving seat. She lies very still until the car stops at David’s new home. The front passengers are startled by her voice announcing It’s me! Her brother, dressed in his riding leathers (as they are too bulky to fit into his bag), ignores her as he is too preoccupied with meeting his new family to make room for his annoying sister. Nevertheless she is there. She sees figures appear on the lighted house porch and watches David disappear inside. John who has remained seated in the car starts the engine and drives off with Rebekah sitting on the back seat.

The returning car stirs her from her fantasies. She hears her father garaging the car then walking quickly towards the house. Inside she hears him click open the teledex that sits beside the telephone, sliding the alphabet reader. Again she is kneeling on her bed to listen. She knows this time that John is calling the brother who made the order to put your boy on the street.

“The boy has gone,” John tells the listening ear.

………..

A few days later she is dragging the index finder along the Teledex in her search for the elusive Alice. Searching, she hears her father’s plea, Alice will you take him?

Decades later Rebekah will learn that her aunt Alice was known to her family as Malc. No wonder she couldn’t find the telephone number.

The telephone voice that she heard on the night of David’s removal is the same voice which tells and retells the story of The Rapture. Although Rebekah would like to have openly scoffed at the notion of a God whom she has never found and who is reported

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to be about to stage an event at the Lord’s Supper where He will sweep His disciples from their seats in the windowless and Spartan halls to a ‘better place’, something stops her.

Rebekah knows that her holding back was driven by a vestige of unease, planted from birth that it wouldn’t do to be left behind. From her distant present she senses her fear when as a child her mind drew pictures of a dangerous world as she listened to her dad tell the story of being left behind. John had planes crashing, buses ploughing into cars, bushfires burning out of control, snakes and rats driven into the open, all because their great friend in the sky was fulfilling His promise to punish the wicked. These prophecies were backed by Annie’s daily reminder of Remember who you are. God is watching.

David moved from studying semi-trailers to playing school cricket. Then he was on his motor bike, revving the engine at Rowley Park starting line while the parental fear mongering drifted past his closed bedroom door at Number 24. Perhaps there was a time when he too looked skywards to find a vast emptiness of blue and clouds then looked earthwards to build on what was there. By the time he left the square house, his knowing was firmly anchored in the world of Speedway riding.

At the time of David’s leaving home, Rebekah and her two sisters were simply bystanders to an adult world. That John had found his boy a home rather than dumping him on the street as ordered was observed but not spoken about. The shadowy brother who ate alone and who led a mysterious life seemingly left without a trace with the exception that there was more ice-cream to go around at the dinner table.

Days later Rebekah came home from school to find David sitting at the kitchen table talking to Annie. She backed silently away as if she had burst in on an intimacy of which she was not a part. Her brother’s visits continued for weeks. He always left Number

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24 before John and Abigail returned from work even though there was no indication from

Annie that his visits should be kept a secret from the remaining family.

Her mother was taking a huge risk. Not only did she instigate the visits (under the guise of David collecting his mail) but she took the chance of either Rebekah or Priscilla letting David’s visits slip into the wrong ears. Had that happened, the family would have been put under house arrest. It was highly probable that Annie would have been excommunicated from the only life she knew.

Annie would never have let David’s visits go by without reminding him of his birthright. That he tolerated this inevitable preaching from a woman who seemed incapable of connecting in any other way with her children perhaps demonstrated his level of perception and compassion. He understood that she was grieving and it was not asking too much of him to give her that space. The visits did cease and it was years before the sisters heard anything more about him.

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14. The One That Got Away

Thirty three years later, Rebekah is sitting at a table carefully examining photos of

David. She has made contact with her cousins whose family took her brother into their home when he was no longer welcome at Number 24. Both her aunt and uncle are now deceased. Her cousins have gathered photos and other mementos of her brother’s life and presented them in an A4 envelope.

She upends the envelope, shaking it clear of its contents. A Photo Shop envelope containing photos, several loose ones, a letter and an enlarged picture of David astride his racing bike approaching the starting gate of a speedway race, fall out. Tucked amongst the contents she finds a copy of her brother’s memorial service.

Distant voices crowd her mind and take her back to the sleep-out at Number 24. It is 1965 and Rebekah is seventeen. A ringing phone cuts through the Saturday morning bed-sheet changing, laundry, hair washing and general busyness as the Bentley girls, headed by Abigail, bring order to their personal lives. Rebekah is heaving her laundry towards the sleep-out door when the ringing stops and John takes the call. She straightens to listen to fragments of sound that seep through the bathroom window. John responds in monosyllable to the caller. Yes is followed by a listening pause followed by I see, another yes then certainly before gratitude is expressed by Thank you dear brother, thank you.

Rebekah hears the receiver click into its cradle. A door closes. Silence.

Annie rings her brass bell to bring the family to the lunch table. She is already seated and after her ringing, she places the bell in front of her on the table. The Bentley sisters take their seat while John remains standing, his hands clasping the back of his chair.

John announces that David was killed at a Speedway race in England. I have just had a call from an important London brother and arrangements are underway. You know David

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didn’t mention speedway when I saw him off at Outer Harbour but somehow I knew that his departure meant that I would not see him again.

The last sentence is not for others. It circles the table then back to the utterer.

Annie sits in impenetrable silence. John’s words David was killed drift upwards to form a suspended cluster above the table. There they cling loosely, moving as one when a draught is created by the opening and closing doors, as if waiting to be claimed.

Rebekah senses a greater degree of remoteness from her mother and from her own emotional flatness fleetingly links Annie’s demeanour to David’s death. The phone rings again and John who has been seated since his announcement leaps up from the table to answer it. When he returns, he tells the family that David’s body will not be flown back to

Adelaide.

“The Brethren won’t allow that because Rowley Park will want to be involved in the burial service. Instead Mr. Stower has contacted a Mr. McFarlane in London. Brother

McFarlane will attend David’s burial service at a nearby location.”

Another wave of words rose above the table to join the already formed cluster that now huddles against the far wall in the kitchen. The newly arrived jostle for space like soldiers preparing for a drill square on a parade ground. Suspended and shifting the words float awkwardly amidst the clatter of cutlery as the silent family eat their meal. Rebekah sees England in pink on her school atlas. When she tries to magnify the pink to accommodate her brother her mind stalls and she is in free fall back to the pink outline of a country shown on a map.

She doesn’t shed a tear, nor does she give much thought to her dead brother, yet when her pet rabbit died she took a week off school to mourn Scruffy’s passing. From her

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present, Rebekah ponders her lack of emotion towards her brother’s death. Was it due to an increasing isolation from the wider world? David had disappeared into a world that at the time was off limits to her. It was a world that had absorbed him and left nothing for her to grasp onto.

Decades later, Rebekah sits before David’s portfolio with his Memorial Service taking centre place. A fresh spray of anger is directed towards her father. Here was a man without ambition and whose happy disposition easily won him friends amongst his chosen group. To them he was a kind and loyal man. For Rebekah, her father’s loyalty was misdirected. He didn’t try to understand his children’s emotional and intellectual needs.

John was content to allow a group of cruel and deluded people masquerading as Christians to make decisions for him. These people had provided ongoing employment and a structured existence where his day was planned for him and providing he abided by their rules his simple needs were met, and so they took precedence over the welfare of his children.

Rebekah’s cousins told her that when John was walking his sister and their distressed mother Alice to the gate of Number 24, he said,

“Alice, I’m not a bad father. It’s the religion.”

That’s our dad, Rebekah tells David’s picture on his Memorial Service. He must blame someone else for his perceived shortcomings. His weak character tried to prevent those who loved you unconditionally, your uncle and aunt and your speedway mates, from attending your memorial service. He didn’t altogether succeed. Your Hammers’ mates were there, shifting awkwardly in their better clothes thinking of their riding mate, his uncomplaining nature, his love of riding, his talent and his untimely death at twenty five years old. Even the Reverend D.H. Cooper who conducted the service and the organist E.

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Booth, Esq.—just names to me mentioned on your memorial service pamphlet did their best to give a stranger a dignified farewell. Their efforts outshone what our parents seemed capable of doing.

Several photos show David in his riding leathers. His arm rests on the shoulder of a mate who is similarly dressed. The white stripes on their jackets signify that David and his friend are members of the Hammers motorcycle riders’ team whose home is the West Ham

Speedway in London. Rebekah pieces this information together from the handwritten scribble on the back of each photo. Further investigation into speedway archives tell her that David was a junior rider who went to London on the advice of his Rowley Park mentor Jack Young to gain more experience. At West Ham he was a reserve rider for the league team.

This added information brings the photos to life. A newspaper cutting describes her brother as stoic in the face of adversity. He lived rough and alone and despite these drawbacks, he never complained. David would leave his lodgings hours before a race to ensure he gave himself plenty of time in case he became lost. His ambition for winning did not overtake his regard for his fellow riders. It was his swerving to avoid a fallen race rider that led to him spinning out of control and hitting the barricade which killed him.

Under Kym Bonython’s stewardship, Rowley Park in the early 1960s was the place to be on a Friday night drawing crowds upwards of fifteen thousand. He sponsored drivers and riders from around the world to participate in Adelaide Speedway, thus providing the local participants with world class competition.

Rebekah’s cousins and friends tell of their Friday nights at Rowley Park. They reminisce on the excitement, the noise and the fun. They speak of the skill that the

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motorcycle riders showed on their brakeless and one gear bikes. The clutch start and the lack of safety devices added to the adrenalin rush of both riders and spectators.

The photo of David at the starting gate bustles with noise and activity. Rebekah hears the engines roaring. She sees her brother waiting for the starting gate to go up, his lanyard around his right wrist. With adrenalin pumping he is off, pushing his bike and his body to their limits to overtake his three fellow competitors. Spectators (and she is now one of them) watch in awe as the riders take the track corners, left knee extended and centimetres from the ground. Riders and bikes bunched tightly. No room for mistakes.

Rebekah gathers the photos that were presented to her in the Photo Shop envelope.

They show David on his aunt and uncle’s property. One of the photos shows her brother in casual clothes squatting on his haunches stroking a cat. She has this photo enlarged.

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15. Sinning

Rebekah’s first task when she came home from school was to take Scruffy from his hutch and let him loose on the back lawn. Invariably she drew the animal into her arms and buried her face into his soft fur. There she told him about the passing of her day; how much she was on Heathcliff’s side in Wuthering Heights and her plans to take Scruffy with her when she escaped her prison.

David was a brother that she didn’t know. She had watched his rebellion with interest and a degree of awe. She saw that he had found a way around the fear and control that was governing her life. David was older and he had pursued interests outside of parental control, calmly weaving his way through the thoroughfare kitchen at Number 24, pausing only to place his rent on the table at Annie’s place and sliding into his chair to eat his meals on his own. When John knocked on David’s door to tell him that he had to pack as he was no longer welcome at the square house, her brother responded without a fuss.

Later she realised that he had anticipated his departure. He was earning and by the time the eviction order came to “put the boy on the street” there was nothing of him to leave behind. He disappeared with his scant belongings into the night to pursue his dream of becoming a respected Speedway rider.

Rebekah did not have a specific interest to take her into the wider world. She wanted to experience it as an end in itself. David’s words “Don’t let them rule you, Min” told her that she didn’t need to make excuses for why she wanted something different to what her parents set up for her. His words linked together to form a life line that reached out and gently encircled her waist to reel her back from the abyss of falling prey to a life not of her choosing.

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Rebekah remembers standing on the outer of a hockey game in first year high. Her stick acted as a prop as she was too tired to concentrate on learning the rules of a game that came under the umbrella of sport and as such was forbidden by her crazy home life. A cool southerly fanned her hot face and mopped the beads of sweat that trickled from her forehead. The school siren sounded. She headed for her bike and rode unsteadily through the gates onto Brighton Road where a tail wind eased her journey homewards.

Sometime during early evening she awoke to find her dad feeling her forehead. A doctor was called. She had a temperature. The pain in her abdomen had subsided to a steady ache. For the next twelve weeks she alternated between bed and sitting in John’s backyard. She wrapped a blanket around her before settling on a hard-backed kitchen chair while an unnamed virus coursed through her. Her chin dropped onto her chest. She was an old woman putting in time surrounded by high fences and windowless halls. Invisible hands gently raised her head skywards where a pale blue canvas beckoned.

That canvas spoke to her. It reminded her that she had imaginative sphere within her that could take her to places: a chamber, freely accessible and waiting to offer a temporary form of escape from the bleakness that surrounded her. She re-entered Number

24 through the wire door with its still clinging hessian bag and drew from underneath her bed a box holding blank sheets of paper and assorted crayons.

Under the blue canvas Rebekah created a palette of burnt orange, lime green, buttercup yellow, fire engine red and cornflower blue. With pen and ink she drew silhouettes of female figures wearing a mu mu or Charleston dresses outlined in black. On another page two rows of wire were supported by rickety wooden fence posts behind which a garden of tall hollyhocks bordered a stone path. In the distance a house roof could be seen poking above the foliage.

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Finally Annie said that Rebekah must go to school. Physically weakened and emotionally fragile, she returned to find her absence had punched a huge schism between her home and school. Her friends had filled her space with girls who had their hair styled, who brought their latest fashion accessory to school, who talked about parties and the upcoming weekend plans; girls who listened to rock’n’roll and who went to dances.

Rebekah was the girl who hung around at the periphery, silenced by her ignorance. In the classroom she sat on her own at the back and drifted into a world of her own making.

Algebra remained a mystery; geography asked her to trace maps, rivers and label them. History dealt with a past. She needed the now to release her from the misery of imposed religion before she could give thought to what had gone before. While the rest of the class assiduously copied notes from the board, Rebekah drew a line spiralling from the outside into narrower coils until a tight knot was reached in the centre of the cone. She sat imprisoned in a cell whose steep walls threatened to obliterate the blue. Most of her cones were carefully constructed in black and white. It took a forty minute lesson time to draw the narrowing spirals in freehand. Occasionally her coils had colour applied to the wider spirals at the outer. She hoped these didn’t disappear.

At home she sat through endless cult meetings, including the mid- week meeting which had become a confessional for those who lamented the fact that they were human.

She watched adults jump to their feet to denounce their family name, their bodies and their thoughts. Sins of the flesh grown men cried, tears streaming and chest beating. One

Brethren sister caught up in the hysteria asked for the microphone into which with a small voice she confessed to having looked at ‘rude’ pictures.

“What pictures?” asked a voice from the pit.

“They were pictures of women with very little clothing on.”

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“We need more information to make a judgement. Let’s start by you telling us where you saw these pictures.”

Rebekah is at her neighbour friend Midgey Brown’s house where the two girls carefully scan a book belonging to Midgey’s dad. The pages feature full page photographs of near naked women in various poses draped suggestively with soft tulle. While the questioning from the pit continues with its focus on the female pose and what parts were uncovered, Rebekah revisits her pictures to recapture the beauty, passion and stirrings that connected her to the pages of the book belonging to Midgey’s dad. She remembers how unmoved she was at the sight of Midgey swinging upside down on her Hills Hoist without knickers on and in front of the Mason boys. The comparison made her appreciate the power of suggestion as the key to appreciating the human form rather than the effect from blatant exposure.

By the time the confessing sister was done with the voices from the pit that had extracted every lewd detail of what she had seen, then judged her as ‘filthy’, the woman was reduced to a crying and battered heap. Rebekah had stumbled across her own sins through similar chastisement from Annie. Here was a woman who was seemingly indifferent to her children until sexual curiosity reared its ugly head. During a stretch of

January holidays Rebekah and Priscilla invited eight year old Stephen Newton from across the road to join them behind the rambling holly bush that grew in the front garden of

Number 24.

A deal was struck between the girls and Stephen that if he pulled his pants down

Priscilla would reward him with a chocolate frog. Stephen wanted to see the chocolate frog first before obliging the girls so Priscilla disappeared inside the square house to fetch the prize. Perhaps her rushing inside then out again before Stephen changed his mind sparked

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Annie’s antennae and drove her to spy on the children from behind her lace window curtains.

The chocolate frog was placed enticingly in view while it rested on a twig platform amongst the sturdy holly foliage. The revealing took place with Priscilla on her hands and knees peering at Stephen’s privates while Rebekah stood silently watching.

A violent hammering on the bedroom window had Stephen grab his chocolate frog and hurriedly exit Number 24, dressing awkwardly as he stumbled onto safer territory. The girls turned towards the window where Annie beckoned Rebekah to meet her inside.

“What were you doing with Stephen?” Annie demanded.

“Having a look.”

“At what?”

“At what makes a boy different from a girl,” stammered Rebekah hurriedly extricating words from a recent biology lesson where the text book heading was The

Differences between Male and Female Bodies.

Rebekah stood pressed against the curtained window of the parental bedroom with

Annie towering over her, demanding more words to explain her shameful conduct. Thus

Rebekah was forced to slam the words back into the pages of her biology book to meet her mother’s demands. In her mind’s eye she saw the words dislodge from the giggling and whispering class of her adolescent peers as they shyly, reluctantly perhaps imagined their future. In Rebekah’s violent dislodging, the words lost the colour brought to them by young minds that were permitted free expression in the classroom.

“I’m sorry Mother,” she said.

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“Sorry for what, exactly?”

“Sorry for being rude and for making you cross.”

“Is that all?”

Rebekah nodded meekly, longing to get away.

“What you have done is that you have blasphemed against Our Lord. You are a disgusting, filthy little girl. Go to your room and ask God’s forgiveness.”

…………

Hence at confessional meetings Rebekah observed the bullies and the bullied.

Annie sat po-faced with her legs crossed at the ankle while around her lives were wrecked as confused members were put under house arrest or withdrawn from, separating them from their spouses and children and the only life they had known.

John sat silently through the madness and the cruelty. Only once did he express his concern to his family at the way a brother similar in age to him was treated. Mr. Preston was caught viewing a television through a store window. At the meeting, he was ordered to his feet. Because Mr. Preston had trouble remembering details of the incident such as the time of day and the name of the store, he was ordered to stand in the corner of the hall with his back to the congregation. Mr. Preston moved meekly to his corner.

On the homeward journey John told the family that he thought the Brethren had gone too far with Mr. Preston. He felt sorry for the brother’s humiliation.

“The brother should never have been made to stand in the corner. That sort of thing is what you might do with children.”

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John’s comments were received silently. Rebekah heard her father and saw the chastised brother’s humiliation. She saw Mrs. Preston drop her head and she saw the rest of the Preston family shift awkwardly in their seats. She knew the embarrassment, the humiliation and the anger that came with being bullied. The incident with Annie over

Stephen Newton had been tossed over and over in her mind. She was pushed into a corner of helplessness.

Another voice of support would have helped Rebekah feel less helpless. Priscilla was not chastised despite her role in the crime. Had Priscilla been there Annie’s disgusting and filthy little girl label would have attached to both girls and although unwanted at least the burden of shame would have been shared. But this didn’t happen. Priscilla escaped the horrid words without as much as an enquiry on how her sister fared. At one level Rebekah understood why her sister had stayed well clear of Annie’s chastisement. The bullying dug deeply and it didn’t stop with the ending of Annie’s lecture. Rather Rebekah was left churning for weeks over her helplessness and a growing need for retaliation.

By the time the news of David’s death reached Number 24, Rebekah was a chronic daydreamer. Her real world was a hostile place through which she drifted aimlessly.

Although she didn’t give much time to thinking about her dead brother, she remembered her silent anger at the way the Brethren ignored her parents’ sorrow. It was as if David had never existed.

On the Sunday after David’s death, the Bentley girls waited with their mother on the front porch of Number 24 for John to use his key to unlock the door. Priscilla swung on the verandah pole and Abigail scraped her shoe on the verandah step to remove some mud. Rebekah’s gaze settled on her mother’s back. She saw Annie’s slightly stooped shoulders and sensed her terrible aloneness. Something inside of Rebekah drove her closer

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to Annie and she draped an arm about her mother’s shoulders. She felt a tremble that settled into a sob, rhythmic and silent. It was a sob that generated from deep inside and passed along Rebekah’s draped arm so that for a few seconds, mother and daughter shared a fleeting expression of humanity.

“I’m sorry about David, Mother,” Rebekah murmured.

The moment ended when John appeared on the verandah with the house key. Annie hesitated before the unlocked and opened door then turned slightly towards Rebekah and in her soft Scots lilt said Thank you dear before disappearing inside.

……….

Rebekah was sixteen when she rode through the school gates that bore a Welcome to Brighton High sign above for the last time. On her first ride in she was in high spirits, comfortable in her school uniform which made her one of the others. But the bottle green tunic, jumper and blazer was not enough to camouflage her ignorance of dance, rock’n’roll, The Beatles, sport, film, fashion, family holidays and socialising, all of which had gathered pace over the summer break that separated primary from secondary school.

She had been forced to repeat first year because it was decided that her illness meant that she had missed too much schooling. Neither parent had attempted to bat for her so school became a wretched place of personal failure.

John found her a job in a meringue factory, owned and staffed by Brethren.

Containers of meringues sat on a long table with each container holding a different coloured meringue. Her job was to place two of each colour into a cellophane bag then seal with a hot iron. Variation came in different shaped meringues that required their own type of packaging.

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At the breakfast table with her third day ahead of her, Rebekah made an announcement.

“I’m not going to work in a factory.”

“But this is only your third day!” gasped an astonished John. “Work is work.

You’re lucky to have a job. Behave yourself and you will get married soon and settle down to being a good wife and mother.”

“I’m not going to work in a factory,” she repeated.

…….

The eastern sun found a narrow window high on the factory wall. Light from a clear morning sky blasted the aperture for an hour or so leaving a blue sky behind as the sun moved overhead. When the suits arrived the following week, it was only blue that she saw. The Brethren brothers were there for a tour of the premises. They were the business men who sat in the leaders’ pit during meetings.

One of the suits, a local leader, paused to watch as Lynette overtook Rebekah on her table round.

“You’ve got a bit of catching up to do,” the suit observed to Rebekah.

“I don’t think so,” she replied. “I don’t intend to make myself giddy packing meringues.”

“So you think you’re too good for this kind of work?”

Rebekah picked up an empty cellophane bag and dangled it before him.

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“Have a go and see how you like it,” she said before turning back to her mindless packing.

………

At Number 24’s kitchen table, Abigail sat in front of her meal and let it go cold.

She had lost body weight and was now stick thin. Her head began to jerk and her lips moved as if she were talking to herself. John said Abigail, you must eat! She said I’m not hungry. He said Please try. Annie sat in her usual silence, seemingly unaware of her daughter’s plight or John’s concern. Rebekah had observed this facial grimacing in other

Brethren and understood that those affected Brethren were purging their mind of ‘sinful thoughts’ to become spiritual. But her sister’s thinness, that was something else. She had watched as Abigail changed into another dress and saw how the dress slid over her wasted hips. The dress was made of blue abstract patterned polyester whose darted bodice met a finely pleated skirt. Abigail had punctured more holes in the belt.

Abigail sat silently throughout the meetings. Others occasionally shouted or audibly mumbled their connection with the divine. Kenneth Steele was about Rebekah’s age. In the meetings he grimaced wildly and talked to himself the entire time. His mother was quite relaxed with her son’s behaviour. She proudly told other sisters that Kenneth was purging himself before the Lord to be a fit disciple to carry out His work. Another sat with her eyes downcast throughout the meeting. Her purging was less dramatic but it did not go unnoticed. After a meeting, Rebekah watched the downcast eyes physically wrestle with an elder’s wife who might have interrupted God’s voice sending the latter scrambling to keep her balance while the downcast eyes fled to her family’s car.

Rebekah watched the purging and thought she might try to reach the divine during meeting time. This would bring her closer to an understanding of what the others were on

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about. She settled into her chair with folded hands resting in her lap, her feet touching the floor, dress skirt covering her knees, head bowed and eyes closed. Hello, she murmured.

There was no answer. This time she was louder. Hello God. It’s Rebekah and I would like to have a chat…about my soul. Ten minutes later, Are you there? Her listening swung to the present constant drone of male voices, the occasional cough and then a baby crying followed by tiptoeing feet clad in heels that pattered their way out behind the swish of pram wheels on the wooden floor, followed by a closing door.

Abigail did start to eat again but she had changed. The spiritual presence that had bypassed Rebekah had spoken to her sister. She lowered her voice, carefully chose the words from her narrow vocabulary, followed orders without delay and set about to please those who controlled her life. At Sunday tea, she painstakingly created a salad mound where finely sliced iceberg lettuce was heaped on a plate then garnished with alternating rows of sliced tomato, beetroot, cucumber, boiled egg (yolks bright with not a hint of grey in sight) and grated carrot. On a Saturday afternoon the kitchen was in lock down as she kneaded bread dough and kept the room temperature steady for the dough to rise before baking in the oven and then presenting her perfect loaf to its basket at the Lord’s Supper.

The confession meetings spoke to her vulnerable side. While she didn’t participate in the public confessions, the hysteria that they generated challenged her notion of personal ‘goodness’. Abigail was forever chastising her thoughts for straying into Satan’s territory. When her lips moved at the dinner table she was rebuking a non- spiritual thought. These were thoughts that strayed to a new outfit, that worried about her disfiguring acne or longed to get her paints and brushes out as she was a talented artist and one who played the piano by ear but who wanted to be able to read music.

…………

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The left side of Annie’s face dropped. This became visible to the family at about the same time as John found her at the incinerator burning photos of David and paper money. John guided her inside and made a cup of tea. Annie recovered with time.

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16. Dead Ends

Rebekah’s employment at the meringue factory ended one Friday afternoon when the boss called her into his office.

“You’ll finish with us today and on Monday you will start working at Mr. Blake’s pharmacy.”

She packed meringues until knock-off time, grabbed her things and left the factory.

She sat with the family to eat her meal, took her place at the sink for the washing up and set about her usual Friday evening and weekend routine. At Monday breakfast, Rebekah watched her father pour cornflakes into his cereal bowl. He was about to reach for the milk when she made her announcement.

“Dad, I won’t need a ride to work as I have been instructed to start at Mr. Blake’s

Pharmacy this morning so I will catch the bus.”

“When were you told this?”

“Late Friday afternoon.”

Words skim over the surface of her life as if they have ball bearings attached. They are rolling away words that serve a practical purpose then vanish. Words that carry a greater complexity of thought and feeling are left unspoken. For the most part she is a robot going through her regimented day as if on auto pilot. Occasionally a surge of energy in the form of anger explodes from deep inside. People soon learnt to keep their distance.

Annie is her mother in the biological sense of the word only. This knowledge reached Rebekah when at thirteen she listened to her Brethren friend Dawn telling of when she walked into her parents’ bedroom to find them “doing it”.

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“Doing what?”

“Making a baby.”

Slowly the diagrams from Rebekah’s school biology book lift from their pages to settle on the blank façade of John and Annie’s closed bedroom door. The idea that Annie has engaged in sexual intercourse at least four times somehow evades sticking power to a woman who still maintained (if she was given a chance) that her children were God-given.

Rebekah was left reeling from her mother’s lies. She remembered how the fresh faced child had looked to her mother for answers and got stone walled time and time again.

Ask God, speak with Him, He is our saviour. Annie had knowingly deceived her little girl and that deception showed Rebekah that her mother couldn’t be trusted.

John on the other hand had at least tried to answer his little girl’s questions. When

Rebekah gazed into the neighbouring back yard from her fence tree branches, she was puzzled to find that the lemon tree that belonged to the Hutchins seemed different to her lemon tree. Both were readily identified as lemon trees with a common shape, leaf and fruit. Yet there was something else that met Rebekah’s gaze.

It was the same something that she saw when she visited the forbidden territory of her primary school friends’ homes. The first visit was always terrifying but once that concluded without her being struck down by the friend in the sky for stepping on worldly property it led to a calmer observation that revealed a number of similarities to her own home. She recognised many plants and shrubs as well as the Hills Hoist and the tank stand.

Inside her worldly friend’s house with her heart racing as concrete evidence of Satan’s handiwork in the shape of cigarettes, a radio, a television, magazines and a record player met her gaze, her seeing was clouded by the push and pull of being so close to Satan’s

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things. Once she emerged from the cloud, even if only for a few minutes, she saw a common theme in the way that worldly houses were furnished and her own was.

When Rebekah asked her father what was it that made the Hutchins’ lemon tree different from her lemon tree, John took her out to his garden. They stood together in front of one of his three lemon trees where he delivered a lesson on lemon tree husbandry. There were a variety of lemon trees all dependent on position, watering, fertilizing and pruning to bear the best fruit. John proudly showed her how he re-directed the house roof water directly onto his fruit trees and emphasized the importance of the watering moats that he established at the base of his trees.

“Deep, slow watering is the best and blood and bone dug regularly into the soil. So you see there are a lot of things to do when caring for lemon trees. Mr. Hutchins probably doesn’t look after his lemons as well as I do and that is why they look different.”

“But dad,” insisted Rebekah. “There is something else I can see from my tree when

I look into the Hutchins’ garden. It is something that I cannot touch. What is that?”

“You’re a funny little thing, Min,” he said while bending down to inspect his cabbages.

……….

Again she is dismissed. Again she recoils to think about the something else. Again she marks a few more demerit points against her father. He makes out he doesn’t know what I’m talking about when it is he who has forced me into this confusing way of life.

Thirty years hence and Rebekah realises that there is a strong probability that John genuinely did not understand the something else. His formative years were spent in a world that was foreign to his middle daughter. He did not see the net that presented a fearful

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barrier to that world which had resulted from relentless cult conditioning. John had spent twenty-eight years in the world that he forbade his children from entering before choosing to join The Exclusive Order of The Plymouth Brethren. This explains why he moved so easily between the two worlds. His undisclosed but constant contact with his natural siblings, his easy supermarket expeditions—in contrast to those of his daughter whose heart quickened at the sound of worldly music being played throughout the store—and his forays into the neighbours’ property were noted carefully by his watchful daughter seething at his hypocrisy. Neither was he a man to mull over his daughter’s insistence of the something else that she saw.

Intellectually, John was not one to stray far from his immediate needs. The

Brethren had given him what he needed and it was to them that his energy was directed.

John was at ease with his day being planned by others and with his ‘place’ in the Brethren hierarchy, albeit secured on a lowly rung where he didn’t have to deal with church politics.

That was all that mattered.

The thrashing that her father attempted after her afternoon at the football destroyed their deteriorating relationship. John took his webbing belt to her because her absence from that afternoon meeting had humiliated him in the presence of an enquiring Brethren brother. Losing one child to the world was humbling enough but to have another one bucking her birthright was crushing. How was he expected to look his community in the eye when couldn’t control his children?

Home he went after that meeting with the sole purpose to fossick out his precious webbing belt to use as a strap on his daughter. It wouldn’t have occurred to him that

Rebekah’s afternoon had been one of deep humiliation and suffering. All he saw was his own demise in the eyes of the Brethren. His daughter’s reaction had shocked and unsettled

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him. John Bentley wobbled like a jelly released from its shaping mould when he was confronted by rebellion.

The incident had shown Rebekah her dad’s loyalty to The Brethren in utter clarity.

This group of social and emotionally challenged misfits were to come before her needs and although that knowing sent her further into isolation, it was a valuable insight to have grasped. She was on her own in her determination to break free. She was not disappointed when that reality manifested itself on the day of her leaving.

Shortly after the attempted thrashing Brethren dads were ordered to show fatherly affection to their offspring throughout their lives. Abigail and Priscilla willingly submitted to John’s goodnight kiss. Rebekah remembers eyeing the approaching expression of ordered affection with increasing panic. She outstretched her arms and with hands uplifted she indicated STOP.

“Don’t touch me,” she warned then added, “It’s too late!”

She knew as the words tumbled out that her behaviour was deeply distressing to her sisters and to John. He was a man who was well liked in his community for his open happy face, his suit coat pocket full of sweets to distribute to the children after the meetings, his unstinting generosity in spending time helping a Brethren brother build a stone fence, visiting the sick and being a loyal friend. She remembers a trip home from

Melbourne after attending meetings there when they came across one of John’s friends driving slowly along the highway. When John learnt that his friend was nursing a sick car engine, Rebekah’s dad offered to trail his friend all the way home. Both cars crawled along at a snail’s pace for at least three hundred miles.

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Had Rebekah understood her father’s need to belong to a community that gave him financial security, where divorce was not allowed, where his day was planned by others whom he believed were so much smarter than he was, where he happily slotted into a hierarchy which placed him on the lower rung for males (the lowest being reserved for females), she might have left room for his more positive attributes. She might not have taken his choices so personally.

Rebekah felt a rising irritability towards what she saw as his weakness. John berated himself for being too soft when he lost David then he changed tactic by wielding his webbing belt in an attempt to rectify his softness. He was all over the place, scrambling to recover his status as an exemplary Christian and an effective head of his household. In his blundering, John managed to turn the incident of David’s burial debacle into a story to impress guests. He focussed on the international telephone call, the clarity of Brother

McFarlane’s English voice covering such a distance and the marvel of God’s design.

Rebekah stared, her top lip curling into a sneer. You fool, she wanted to shout. There’s nothing entertaining about David’s death and his burial! John didn’t have the insight to acknowledge that the Brethren’s treatment of David’s death and burial was shameful and as such should never be spoken about with these people. Likewise, John didn’t have the wherewithal to acknowledge Rebekah’s rebellion and to outline his position. He couldn’t say that his time in the world brought him utter misery but at the same time he couldn’t predict what she may find and he wished her the very best. A remark like this might have staved off Rebekah’s increasing hostility towards her father.

John would have processed Annie’s increasing isolation as a result of her crippling arthritis and her ongoing grieving over David’s death. It would never have occurred to him that his wife might have seen the something else and had succumbed to the fear. Rebekah remembers the occasional visits to the zoo and to Mosely Square during the summer

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school holidays where she and Priscilla rode the horses on the merry-go-round while her mother stood nearby. As time gathered pace and the 1960s dawned with its huge social and political changes, the world that Annie had tentatively stepped into to take her children on an outing had become a frightening place. She drew her reading chair close to the net curtains covering the lounge room window and with her back to the light settled down with her Bible and her church ministry books to immerse herself into a grim world of religious fundamentalism.

It is hard to imagine a more withdrawn and fearful person. At times John could be heard gently coaxing his wife to drive with him to the shops where he would wind her passenger window down a little to allow a gentle breeze passage to reach her. Rebekah remembered going along for a ride. She sat alone in the back seat behind John. Her eyes rested on her mother whose gaze was fixed ahead of her. At the supermarket, Annie sat waiting for John: small, still and withdrawn, anxious to return to the safety of her home.

There were times when Rebekah heard her mother playing hymns on the family organ. Through an open door, Annie could be seen reading the music from a sheet propped in its receptacle on the organ. At other times her mother carried her pet canary or replacement budgerigar in its cage to place on the northern house verandah where she sat reading while it pecked and chatted alongside.

In the early 1960s the order came that pets were forbidden. Pets were now considered a distraction that took The Chosen Ones’ attention away from God. These furry friends were instantly euthanased, driven to the other side of the clouded bubble to become enveloped by the net of Satan. Brethren spies swung into action, snooping around members’ house properties unannounced looking for evidence that a pet still roamed.

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Fortunately the Bentley household was between furry friends. Rebekah remembers thinking that the edict represented a closing down of the last vestige of softness in her life.

By now her rebelliousness was well known amongst The Brethren. Mothers cautioned their daughters about speaking with her. Rebekah had also refused to wear a token. Initially the black ribbon known colloquially as a subjection band was whipped off her head when she noticed that no other girl wore a band at her school. Hence it spent the school day in her case entangled with lunch wrappers and other paraphernalia until she reached her home gate where she hastily retrieved it and fixed it to her hair before entering her house yard.

At about sixteen years of age, she stopped wearing it altogether. The innocuous black felt ribbon tied in a small bow and fixed to the hair by a bobby pin became a symbol of powerlessness. She knew that if she gave in and began wearing it, she would be lost to the bubble forever. Her stance inevitably brought increased ostracism. When she removed her hat at a Brethren home where her family were dinner guests, all eyes travelled to her tokenless hair. Spare tokens were offered. On one occasion, a host brother ordered her to accept his wife’s offer. Rebekah marched into the master bedroom where her hat and gloves laid on the bed and returned to the lounge room wearing her hat which was thrown carelessly on her head.

John sat with his eyes cast downwards. Annie stared stoically into the distance and

Rebekah’s sisters shifted nervously in their seat.

“For goodness sake, just wear your token and stop embarrassing us,” they hissed.

“I can’t,” she replied.

………..

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Rebekah’s new job coincided with her enrolling in English, Geography and

Ancient History which she arranged through correspondence. She would take two years to complete her Leaving or Year 11 equivalent then apply for a job outside of the Brethren.

Six subjects were required to achieve her certificate so she took Arithmetic, Chemistry and

Biology the following year.

The family moved house to live in Forrestville so that they were close to their local hall which was just down the road. After the local meetings, Rebekah left the hall immediately to walk home rather than endure the awkwardness of standing alone while others ignored her. Once inside her house door, she knelt beside her bed and lifted the draped candlewick bedspread to select a text that she was working with and sat cross legged on the floor to read until the others arrived.

Part of her job at the pharmacy was delivering medicines to the Repatriation

Hospital. She was provided with a car which she drove home each evening to park in her home driveway behind John’s Holden. The car allowed her to attend early evening night school for Chemistry and Biology tuition. At times she missed a local meeting but for the most part this was tolerated as The Brethren were showing patience towards their erring sister.

Each week a large envelope bulging with lecture notes, more assignments and marked work arrived at the Forrestville house via mail. Rebekah waited until the family retired for the night before she carried her books across the passageway to work quietly at the dining room table. Her decision to further her education was accepted by John as his daughter’s way of feeling better about herself. Just as he painstakingly taught himself to read and write under Annie’s supervision so too was Rebekah improving herself and he

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was confident that her commitment to her study would quieten her and mould her into a servant of God.

The female servant of God envisioned her future as a devoted wife to her husband and the bearer of as many children as God gave her. There was one Brethren brother from interstate that showed interest in making Rebekah his wife but after others warned him about Rebekah’s rebellious nature, he thankfully turned away. At the time she was flattered by his attentions but once they died she reverted to planning her escape.

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17. “It’s your life!”

A uniform was required at the pharmacy. A few days into her new job Rebekah arrived in white. It was a simple fitted bodice flaring into an A-line skirt with short sleeves, Peter Pan collar and a zipper at the side. She deposited her handbag and was about to attend to the cash register when a pair of hands brushed against her breasts then fingers pinched her bodice taut. Repulsion, repugnance and disgust merged instantly into a force that had her spring away from the uninvited touching to a spot where she stood, eyes narrowed and arms folded.

“Don’t you ever touch me again,” she said, her insides heaving in the wake of an adrenalin rush.

“But I was only…” Blake began.

Rebekah turned away, opened the safe and placed the float into the cash register drawer then slammed it shut. Ten minutes into her work day and she was reduced to a shaking mess. At least at the meringue factory she was left alone. Now it was her and her repulsive boss. Self-pity thankfully gave way to a plan to best manage the situation, which after all was only temporary. She would be out of there short of two years. In the meantime, the car that she was provided with allowed her to attend night school.

She refused to engage in conversation with her boss unless the topic was job related. Pharmacist Blake managed to say that he was praying hard for her evident unhappiness and accompanying disrespect to come to an end. Again she just stared for a few seconds then turned away. Blake soon gave up and spent most of his day sleeping in his office. Rebekah was left to fill out the scripts and type the bottle and packet labels and when she was finished she banged on his desk to wake him to check her unqualified

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dispensing. She enjoyed working alone in the dispensary along with placing orders to the pharmaceutical companies. She enjoyed driving the work car to the Daw Park Repatriation

Hospital to deliver medicine to some of the patients.

A doctors’ surgery was next door to the pharmacy. Two general practitioners used the premises for consultation on alternate days. One of the practitioners tried to delve a little deeper into the occasional religious rambling that pharmacist Blake engaged in.

You’re a religious man the doctor began.

“No, I’m not religious. I am a servant of the Lord. He is my guide and saviour,”

Blake interrupted in a pious voice.

Realising that he was dealing with a delusional fundamentalist, Dr. Llewellyn collected the medicine that he was after and left the pharmacy. A couple of days later he reappeared. This time pharmacist Blake was asleep in his office.

“Don’t bother him. I’d rather deal with you,” announced the doctor as Rebekah went to bang on Blake’s desk.

Request sorted, Dr. L was on his way out when he paused, then turned to speak with Rebekah.

“You know,” he began. “You should be having fun. You’re not bad looking but clearly you are very unhappy. I urge you to get out and enjoy your young life. It passes quickly.”

“I can’t enjoy my life. My parents won’t let me. They are very strict,” blurted a confused Rebekah. She heard the words leap away from her as if they had waited, crammed against a possible opening so that when an opportunity arose out they fell, spiralling downwards in short sentences that focussed on her now ruined teenage years.

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Thankfully the prolonged silences that she was used to had diminished her word bank.

There were not the words at hand to continue a rant about the huge social and emotional gaps that her weird life had engendered as a result of being born to parents who were nuts.

No one on the outside could possibly understand the hurdles that would have to be cleared for her to enjoy freedom. She would have to learn basic skills (imagine that Dr. L?), skills at eighteen, nineteen and twenty years of age such as going to the hairdressers, to the cinema, a restaurant, a polling booth, catching a ball, being assertive without fighting all the time—skills Dr. L that others take for granted—and the worry is that it might be too late.

“It is your life. Remember that. No one has a right to take it away from you. I’m sure you will find a way to happiness and I wish you the very best,” said the doctor before turning door-wards and leaving the pharmacy.

Over the coming months his words re-played in her head. It is your life, Rebekah.

Remember that! Remember that!

………..

Priscilla had been caught walking along Jetty Road with her long hair hanging loosely down her back and no hat. Miss Brown, who was walking in the opposite direction on the same footpath, turned to run after Priscilla when the latter swept past the oncoming sisterhood, her long legs striding the limits of her uniform skirt, hair bouncing about her shoulders. Priscilla! Priscilla! Miss Brown called, clattering on her heels and breathlessly drawing close enough to her prey to clutch at her person.

“I will have to report you,” she warned.

“Yes,” replied Priscilla. “I can’t stop now as I have to hurry back to the bank.”

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At the dinner table that evening, Priscilla quietly took John’s reprimand and

Rebekah heard her father’s expression of disappointment in his youngest daughter who up until then had been held in high regard with the Brethren. They will be shocked. We’re all shocked, he lamented, dreading the thought of being hauled into The Brethren spotlight again! It was Wednesday so the matter would be further discussed in the meeting later that evening with the Bentley’s local leader issuing a punishment.

Ten minutes into the meeting, the Bentleys learnt that another order had come from the American world leader, James Taylor (Jnr). This one dictated that women’s hair must be worn loose with a scarf instead of a hat used as a head covering. The hat, which until ten minutes ago was a mandatory head covering for Brethren females when they were in public or at meetings, was now banished.

As soon as the meeting was over Miss Brown rushed over to Priscilla.

“You were right,” she said. “I was the one in the wrong. I apologise.”

Rebekah is standing near her sister when Miss Brown delivers her gushing apology. She hears a breathlessness of urgency to adjust to a rule that makes no sense at all. A scarf versus a hat: hair tied back or loosely hanging down one’s back? Who cares!

Whether a scarf or a hat covers the female head it has the same intended purpose of reducing women to a servant status. Uncut hair worn up or down is still uncut hair.

Rebekah’s life line gently encircles her waist. You will soon be out of here, a voice tells her.

At home, Rebekah watches her family absorb the new ruling. John’s relief at being spared another Brethren grilling with the timely announcement of a rule that places his youngest daughter Priscilla ahead of the pack is unmistakable. Imagine that Annie. Our

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Priscilla was right after all! Annie is seated at the kitchen table. A freshly brewed pot of tea sits clothed in its cosy. Rebekah sees a soft smile on her mother’s face. John is happy: she is happy.

Priscilla pours tea into her cup before sitting at the table. What a pain it was in having to do my hair on the way to the tram, she muses. Rebekah had seen her sister struggling with her hair as she pushed into a south westerly wind. The soft dilly bag swung violently away from her side with its opening twisting closed as Priscilla tried to drop her hair rollers into its receptacle. On these occasions, Rebekah drove her little loan car triumphantly past her sister, while giving a short toot of the horn. Back in the kitchen,

Abigail promised to scarf shop the next day so that Annie and her sisters were ready to present at the next meeting dressed in line with the new rule.

True to her word, scarves were distributed the following evening just in time for the local reading meeting. Rebekah and her sisters lined up behind Annie with their scarves in place to take their seats in the hall. Annie’s wispy, grey, untrimmed hair hung loose down her back and as she limped into the hall, relying heavily on a walking stick,

Rebekah thought she looked remarkably like a witch.

She wondered how far her family would go to satisfy their leader’s lust for control.

She saw families destroyed by the separation rule and she knew that when the time came for her to leave home for the outside world her parents would close the family home door behind her and she would be disowned by them. What if JT(Jnr) ordered a massacre?

Would her family be up for it? It was a discomforting question because from where she was standing she saw her parents, and sadly her sister Abigail, repeatedly and unquestionably fall in line behind their leader.

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Growing up it was Annie that Rebekah thought was the needy parent. Her mother’s isolation, her fear of the world outside of her home gate and her commitment to her fantasy world were a heady mix of acute dependence. David’s expulsion from The Brethren and his home showed a surprising side of Annie. She decided she wasn’t ready to cast her first born aside just then so she took a huge risk of having him visit. Later when the mid-week meetings became confessionals and where sexual misdemeanours were pounced on and discussed in detail, when these same meetings were host to the latest directive from the

MOG, Annie stayed away. She used her arthritis as an excuse for her absence and got away with it because she presented as a diligent reader of the Scriptures and church ministry and her cultivated subservience enabled her to bypass The Brethren radar.

As time marched onwards and the cult became more demanding of its followers,

John seemed to overtake Annie with his neediness. Despite his ready smile, happy disposition and gregarious nature, there was something pathetically weak about his personality. Rumours were circulating that JT (Jnr) loved to drink whiskey and the MOG had proposed that each one of his minions should share in his passion. It wasn’t long before the great man decreed that drinking wine and spirits was mandatory in Brethren homes.

Privately John baulked. He told his family that no way was a drinks cabinet going to be installed in his house. Publicly he sang to a different song sheet. At Brethren homes where whiskey was offered, John accepted a glass. Annie declined without explanation. No thank you, she said her voice firm but carefully free of censure.

Inevitably a drinks cabinet was wheeled into John’s lounge room and filled with an assortment of hard liquor and wine. The financial outlay to comply with the latest directive was quite a struggle for John but he did it. He complied with something that Rebekah

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thought she would never see her father doing. In many ways it was sad to see John once again surrounded by alcohol which he thought he had freed himself from by joining the little Christian group all of those years ago. Those on the bottom rung of Brethren hierarchy, such as unmarried women who were robbed of dignity and a purpose in life, were soon downing the scotch whiskeys to dull their pain. Some of the married sisterhood were doing likewise, leaning on the baby’s pram to help steer them to their seat in the hall: bullied, exhausted by childbirth and glassy eyed.

Once again the Bentley family prepared for a Wednesday night meeting in the main hall. Annie was not coming. Her leg was bad. She was still managing to appear at the

Lord’s Supper and the meetings that filled that day, but that was all. In the meantime

Abigail sat in the front passenger car seat while Rebekah and Priscilla sat in the back. At the hall, John parked the unlocked car in Young Street and the Bentleys filed into the hall.

Watches were synchronised in the pit and at 7.30pm precisely, a hymn was announced and sung, followed by a prayer. Ten minutes into the meeting and it was obvious to the most unaccustomed eyes that the Inner Circle of Brethren Brotherhood were drunk.

A microphone fell to the floor. The leader and his disciples sat sprawled in their chairs on the hall’s platform. One of the brothers leant forward to pick up the microphone then handed it to his leader who pressed the red button to carry his slurred words to his waiting audience. The ramblings from the platform focused on the Hebrew Bible’s son of

Nun which in turn lent itself to some sleazy possibilities from the pit on how one could be a son of none. Very soon the pit was in an uproar. Brothers hooted with laughter, some stamped their feet, other shouted witticisms above the melee.

Rebekah sat with her hymnbook and Bible resting on her lap. Her eyes swung around the hall, watching, waiting and listening. They swung past John then back again,

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flicked away then returned to rest on her father. She watched as he struggled to find an appropriate facial expression for a fresh set of circumstances that had caught him unprepared. It wouldn’t do to show disapproval as some eyes were still capable of monitoring reaction. She waited while an expression of utter bewilderment settled into disappointment followed by sadness sweep across John’s face. C’mon dad, you hate drunkenness. Get up! Walk out! Say no! Rebekah urged. Then she saw her father’s face recover and settle into a form of its characteristic equanimity.

The noisy pit ceased to reach her and her father’s reaction was of no interest anymore. One swift movement and she was on her feet turning towards her vacated chair to leave her hymnbook and Bible before walking towards the hall door. She didn’t bother to tip toe along the wooden floorboards, instead she planted her heeled feet one after the other flat on the floor tapping her way out of a life that had been foisted on her.

She kept walking until she found the unlocked FE Holden and slid into the back seat. Ahead the western night sky blanketed the City to Bay tram track giving an illusion of sky meeting land. She knew that this illusion would dissipate with the rising sun to reveal a seemingly endless suburbia and accompanying bustle of daily life. Sitting in the dark car she was content to take in the moment with her thoughts focussed on what she saw from her window. The nursing home adjacent to where the FE Holden was parked was in darkness except for a blue glow from a night light over the entrance. Occasionally a car passed, its headlights picking out a street tree as it turned into King William Road.

Inside the hall, the final hymn was being sung, its familiar tune reaching Rebekah’s ears. Soon The Brethren would spill through the front hall doors and disperse.

Priscilla and Abigail waited in their seats while John was briefed on the shutting up process. Ideally the house was partitioned with a curtain, behind which the person under

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discipline was imprisoned. However that segregation was reserved for the less serious misdemeanours. Rebekah’s crime of walking out on a MOG disciple was placed at the pinnacle of subordination. What about a caravan in the back yard for her? John said that there wasn’t enough room to fit a caravan through the narrow gap between the garage and the house wall. Finally an alternative was agreed upon, and that was to lock the door of the room where the recalcitrant stayed until further notice.

The Bentleys left the hall quickly and arrived together at the parked car. John opened his door then leant through the opening to speak to Rebekah.

“Don’t you ever do that again,” he said.

“I won’t because I’m not going back.”

………..

At home, Rebekah found her mother in the kitchen. I’m leaving, Mother, she told

Annie who had risen from her chair when she heard the car turn into the home driveway.

Rebekah saw her mother pause then rest her left hand on the table for support.

“I thought you might,” she said quietly. “I have seen this coming for some time.”

……….

The family set about preparing the house for a sister under discipline. Priscilla moved her things from the bedroom which she had shared with Rebekah into Abigail’s room. John prepared a tray for Rebekah’s meals before rummaging around in his toolbox for a bolt to attach to Rebekah’s prison door. Abigail was instructed to take on the role of escort. Rebekah must knock on her locked door to alert Abigail when the former wanted to use the bathroom.

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Meanwhile an imprisoned Rebekah examined the bedroom window then used scissors to cut the fly screen to allow her an exit to the outside. These activities were undertaken quietly and efficiently before the house sank into night time darkness. Rebekah calmly accepted the conditions imposed on her by her family who were now strangers. She had nothing to say to them.

The next morning she was awoken by the arrival of her breakfast tray followed by

John unlocking her door. She waited for his footsteps to die away before she opened her door. When it was time to deposit her spent tray outside for collection she used the unlocked door to call for Abigail to take her to the bathroom. Rebekah was careful to give the impression that she was not going to challenge the rules.

In her locked room, she dressed and made her bed. She heard the family leave for the working day. Annie had disappeared into the bowels of the house since Rebekah had spoken with her. She knew that her mother had dismissed her daughter and therefore she would not hear or see anything that might call for her intervention while the others were at work. Rebekah lifted the window screen and climbed out. Once in the city she used a public telephone to ring her workplace to explain that she wouldn’t be in for the next two days. That done she purchased a copy of The Advertiser which she carried into David

Jones cafeteria where she ordered a cup of tea.

Did it happen on the escalator or was the net pulled away when she entered the cafeteria? It was one of those things that dawned on her after the event. At the cafeteria table with her paper opened to flats and houses to rent she sipped her tea with her black biro poised in her right hand to swoop on possibilities. Plympton, f/male early 20s to share flat with similar. Non-smoker. Inside cat. Ring….and ask for Cathy. The black pen circled

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several times. Close to the City-Bay tramline and a soft furry creature to become friends with. What more could she want?

She enjoyed that cup of tea. There was time for another before she hunted for a public telephone to ring Cathy. She returned to her table bearing her second cup and a scone with jam and cream when she realised that the veil had lifted. It had lifted perhaps surreptitiously when she had walked out of the hall. She had been amazed by how easy it was in the end to say enough! She had obtained her Leaving Certificate and won a clerical job with the Mines Department. The way was clear for her to make her move. At first she hesitated. Hatching plans of a midnight dash, repeatedly stalled when she wondered where she might stash her case in the barren front yard. As soon as she got to that point, the plan disintegrated into fragments of calling a taxi, finding somewhere to stay at short notice, trying to work out how much she needed in savings and what she would say in a note to her parents.

She wasn’t quite ready then. She needed an incident to synchronise the brain, limbs, heart and soul to do what she must and what she had been working towards for years. There would be no regrets, no thought of return or pining for (an imaginary) family.

As she left the hall, she was in the driving seat, her right foot planted on the accelerator.

With plenty of fuel in the tank she plunged through the net that distorted her view of the world, into a future of exciting possibilities.

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18. “Please Don’t Go, Min!”

It was Friday evening and Rebekah’s third and final night under house arrest. She was returning to her room from the toilet which was accessed via the laundry when Abigail who was leading the way, paused at the kitchen door and turned to her.

“Please don’t go, Min,” Abigail pleaded. “When you leave I know that Priscilla won’t be long in going as well. That leaves me to look after mother and dad. I know that this life can be hard but I could show you how to make it work. You could learn to like it.”

Rebekah felt her legs weaken. It was less than twenty four hours since she had sat through a customary visit from a church elder who told her that an angry God would show

His disapproval of her behaviour by punishing her through her children and/or ill health.

She had heard these threats flung from the pulpit since she was a small child. They were words that were meant to frighten, to make one shrink into submission to a prescribed way of thinking. They were designed to rob her of her potential by stunting her ability to think for herself. Rebekah had stood with her shoulders back while the threats pinged away from her like pebbles do when they are thrown at a water tank: unmoved, unaffected and resilient.

Now her weakened knees were supported by feet that anchored her to the cement laundry floor while her sister’s words You could learn to like this life had her swaying gently on one spot. Her body tips forward to accept a mask. It takes her into the kitchen where she announces her return. Hello Mother and dad—I’m done with the struggle. Annie links the word struggle with Satan and nods her approval. John’s hears his daughter admit her mistake in resisting something that is already in place. His cautious relief sweeps across the spectrum of a dutiful daughter, one who knows her place, and one who honours

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her parents because that is the way that things are. He continues to chop the dinner vegetables. She hears the chop, chopping rhythm of his knife.

Something else is marching towards Rebekah to take a swipe at the mask and leave it dangling off one ear. At one level Rebekah hears Abigail talking to herself, willing the cement to dry that fixes an outer persona of complicity over her true character. There is some indication from the force that has knocked Rebekah’s mask sideways that a disguise may become a fixture.

In an instant Rebekah is her twelve-year-old self crouching low beneath the kitchen window, finding her feet through the hedge archway then leap-frogging over the low front fence to make her way towards the Smith’s place. She walks quickly through the overgrown driveway of a neighbour’s place where sudden outbursts of anger are heard on a regular basis, things are flung and her friend Wendy loses her dresses to her brother.

Judgement from Number 24 against Number 27 is short, sharp and damming. Rebekah’s hearing rises above the dire warnings issued inside the square house. She hears the fun of a game being played in the adjoining paddock where the neighbourhood girls take their positions on the fence-line of neighbouring properties to adjudicate a football game being played by the boys. She is driven, coaxed towards the fun.

She finds Wendy Smith sitting on her back fence so she scales the corrugated iron by standing on the bottom wooden rail to cling to the upper rail then hauls herself up. Over the years, the Smith kids have constructed a fence seat by hammering the iron at a right angle to envelop the top wooden rail. Seated thus, the two girls are soon immersed in giving a running commentary on the game being played in the paddock.

Rebekah senses movement to her right and she turns her head to see Annie pummelling her way through the Smiths’ weeds.

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“Get home, NOW!” orders the voice from behind tall marshmallow weed and wild clumps of bamboo.

A combination of seeing Annie in the Smiths’ yard (something Rebekah never anticipated) and the terrible tone in which the three words are flung at her, cause Rebekah to lose her footing so that she slides to the ground, slicing open her left inner forearm on a loose piece of fence iron. Wendy turned at Annie’s voice. Watching as Rebekah fell to the ground now seeing her friend’s bloodied arm, screams.

“Shh!” warns Rebekah. “You’ll have me killed. I’d better go.”

Inside the kitchen at Number 24, Annie has resumed washing dishes. When her bloodied daughter appears she simply flings a tea towel towards her. Annie’s anger rocks the dish water over the side of the sink. It rides on the cutlery and crockery as they slam into a pile for drying and it hangs in the caught tea towel.

Rebekah glances cautiously at her wound and sees a deep gash that runs the length of her inner arm, bleeding profusely. Mother my arm is bleeding. Please help me, she pleads to the not hearing ears so in desperation she shouts above the tea towel, the pile of washed dishes and the red scrubbing brush.

“I will join up,” she cries. “I will try to be good like you.”

Immediately the dish scrubber rises above the sink to glide to a resting spot on the window ledge. There is a smile on Annie’s face when she turns towards her daughter. Her mother wipes her hands on her apron then moves quickly towards the back door.

“John, come quickly! Rebekah has decided to give herself to the Lord.”

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The old wire door, with its piece of 3 ply nailed to its bottom half and the old a hessian bag now perilously hanging to the top half, opens wide and John strides through to the kitchen. At last a parent has noticed the bleeding arm and is soon tearing strips from an old sheet to bandage the wound. Appeasement allows space for the wound to be attended and for a degree of healing to take place. She should have had stitches, as the gash formed a long white ridge that snaked its way down her arm, scarring her for life.

……….

Nine years later with her feet crumbling beneath her, Rebekah faces her sister.

“I can’t stay,” she announces. “You needn’t stay either. Mother and dad will be looked after by the Brethren. They chose this life and expected us to follow. We were never asked if this is what we wanted. Please Abigail think carefully.”

With that, her legs straighten to take her through the kitchen to her bedroom where

Abigail dutifully draws the bolt across the outside of Rebekah’s bedroom door.

She slept well, her eyes opening to the dawn light that slowly penetrated her window blind. She heard her breakfast tray arrive, followed by John’s door knock and his release of the door bolt. Rebekah plumped her pillows then pulled a jumper over her pyjama top before opening her door to receive her breakfast of toast and tea. A note from

John also sat on her tray. Be ready at 9.30am and I will drive you to your lodgings.

It was 7.30am by the time she deposited her spent tray outside her door. Slowly she moved about her room, lifting the window blind to a heavily clouded winter sky. She had a distant knowing that this was a momentous day: perhaps the most significant day of her life, yet instead of counting down the hours of her old life or anticipating her freedom by

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planning her new wardrobe and hairstyle, her eyelids drooped sleepily. She reset her alarm for an hour, snuggled under the bed clothes and promptly fell asleep.

At 9.20am she had dressed, made her bed and clipped her case shut. She tested her door to find it unbolted so she stepped with her case into the hallway and then out through the front door to John’s waiting car.

Her movements were perfunctory. She placed her case beside the locked car boot then gazed unseeing into the street. When she turned back to the car she saw Annie standing on the house verandah between the front door and the parental bedroom window.

This was the first time Rebekah had seen her mother since she told her that she was leaving.

She hadn’t expected to see Annie again but there she was, standing amongst the morning shadows on the day of her daughter’s departure. Was it the unexpectedness of her mother’s presence that propelled a curious Rebekah towards her? Or was it a sense of duty to the mother and daughter bond through childbirth and subsequent community expectations?

Rebekah’s eyes lowered as she climbed the step then when she was sure of her footing she met her mother’s gaze. She noted as a fact that tears had gathered in Annie’s eyes.

“Goodbye Mother,” she said softly to the glistening eyes then wondered if she should plant a kiss on her cheek. As Rebekah hesitated, she saw Annie square her shoulders then nod her response.

………

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John was already sitting in the car when Rebekah returned. He must have approached from the back of the house via the driveway. She climbed into the passenger seat then gave her father the name of her ‘lodgings’.

“Hyde Park Motel. I will stay there until Wednesday when the flat that I am going to share with another girl will be available.”

They drove the short distance in silence. About a year ago John had driven down a backstreet when his usual route to the main meeting hall was blocked by roadworks. He was surprised to see a motel tucked away in a back street as they’re usually on main roads to be easily spotted by motorists driving into Adelaide from interstate. Rebekah had read the sign Hyde Park Motel, Accommodation and Meals and had filed it in her memory bank as somewhere she could escape to.

In the meantime, she sat in the front passenger seat and gazed nonchalantly through the car window. She was aware of the bustle of Saturday morning activity and although she was technically a part of it that immediacy was suspended for the time being. She was encased in a capsule sealed off from movement, noise and smell. She wasn’t unhappy. In fact she was calm and sleepy. Her focus was to register at the motel, take her key, lock the room from the inside and sleep.

The car glided close to the kerb then stopped. Front car doors flung open and John unlocked the boot then deposited Rebekah’s case on the pavement. She picked up her case and called thanks to John’s retreating back. He seemed anxious to be on his way. The car engine fired and he was gone.

Inside her room, Rebekah dropped her case on the floor, inspected the bathroom, darkened the room, took off her shoes then dived under the bed clothes. She slept until

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mid- afternoon, waking slowly and comfortably in the motel room. Sounds from the outside began to filter under the door and through the single pane glass window. A car’s wheels crunched on the gravel of the motel’s courtyard. Children’s voices, followed by a key unlocking a unit door, family chatter and car doors closing filled the air for about ten minutes then subsided to make way for the sound of a barking dog.

Hunger pangs had her out of bed to look closely at the tea tray. She filled the kettle with water from the bathroom then released a couple of biscuits from their silver wrap.

While the kettle boiled, she picked up the television remote and clicked the ON button. A black and white picture flickered into life and for a few minutes she stared at the screen which showed an interview held between two men. She guessed it was about football although the commentators might as well have been speaking in a foreign language.

Names were thrown about—everyday names such as Jones, Smithson, Phillips—but they were meaningless, as were the aspects of a game that she had never followed. She discovered how to change channels only to find that all four were dominated by football.

The television epitomised the key to her new world: a screen that would beam a cross section of fellow Australians going about their daily lives and thus providing her with a private peep into her preferred culture that had not been available until now. She turned it off and returned to her bed to lie on the covers. There she told the ceiling that she was free, the window, that she was free to turn on the television; the bar fridge, that she was free to buy fashionable clothes; the curtains, that she was free to cut her hair; and the bathroom door, that she was free to go to a restaurant. She was free to enjoy all of these things only perhaps there was more to freedom than simply turning a switch. Television, the clothing store (in her old life she had her clothes made as the dress code was too old fashioned for retail shops to meet the strict cult requirements), the hairdressers and the restaurant were experiences awaiting her.

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Rebekah was about to make her first foray into a restaurant. Earlier in Motel

Reception she had seen the sign Dining Room: Breakfast 7-9am: Dinner 5-8pm etched into a glass door. It was to this glass door that her thoughts turned. She was hungry and it was

5pm.

In the bathroom she splashed her face with warm water then returned to her case to pull out a grey work skirt, straight and knee length, then pushed her arms through the sleeves of a pink short-sleeved jumper then her matching cardigan. She slipped her stockinged feet into black stilettos. Her fine un-cut hair fell loosely just short of mid back.

At the restaurant doors, Rebekah was led to her table by a waitress. She was not the first as two other couples sat close by. As soon as she was seated the waitress unfolded her serviette which had been fashioned into a cylindrical shape to stand on the table. When released from its folding, the waitress flapped it in the air then directed it like a witches’ carpet coming in to land. Rebekah went to grab it mid flourish and missed as the waitress’s hands dipped beneath Rebekah’s to steer the unfurled serviette onto her lap.

The disconnection with the serviette caused Rebekah to feel foolish and conspicuous to the other diners. Her immediate reaction was to fight back, to tell the waitress to stop treating her like a child, but the waitress had moved onto other things. A menu landed beside Rebekah’s bread and butter plate. What would you like to drink?

Rebekah gazed at the food menu not thinking that the drinks menu might be on the back. Capable hands flicked the menu over. Rebekah scanned the drinks menu and landed on the words Rhine Riesling.

“I’ll have a glass of that, thank you.”

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The words were out before she had given herself a chance to think about whether a glass of Rhine Riesling was wise. What if she didn’t like it? What if alcohol made her dizzy, or worse, sick?

Her waitress pushed through the swing doors bearing Rebekah’s glass of wine.

Now she waited expectantly for the food order. How grateful Rebekah was to see the word roast. She didn’t venture to ask what type of meat was available in the roast of the day.

“Roast, please.”

“Sweets?”

“Apple pie and ice-cream.”

The waitress jotted down the order on her order pad, collected the menu and left

Rebekah hesitating before her glass of wine. Before she left the Bentley abode, her family did not drink alcohol at home. The Sunday morning sacrament of Holy Communion where

Penfolds Tawny Port was passed around in a two-handled silver jug was Rebekah’s only experience with alcohol. It was the port wine that made Sunday’s pre-dawn meeting endurable. She had mastered the technique of a ‘slow sip’ that filled her mouth with deliciousness which she savoured before gently swallowing.

Now she planned to transfer that technique to her glass of Rhine Riesling. Again she took a practiced slow sip then almost spat it out when the bitterness reached her taste buds. Swallowing brought tears to her eyes.

She reached into her handbag which was on the floor beside her chair and fossicked for a tissue while she squeezed her eyes tightly shut to wring the tears from them. She swept the tissue across her nose in an effort to soak up the moisture that trickled down her cheeks.

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Re-composed, she glanced at the couple sitting at an adjacent table. The woman sipped her wine elegantly between joining into the table conversation. To Rebekah’s eyes the couple represented a comfortable union. Here was a man and a woman interacting easily and equally to the pleasure of a shared evening meal. She liked what she saw.

She realised that stepping into new situations required caution. She was glad to be alone for her first restaurant experience. She took another sip of her wine to find that her taste buds were more accommodating.

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19. Plumbago

You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it is going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

Robert M Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 155.

They were there and then they were gone. Did Rebekah miss them? She would have been startled by the question. As she slept cocooned in her motel room that afternoon of her release, the silent workings of her mind rearranged itself. John and Annie were shoved into a space along with their way of life, the little window darkened and the door closed. For twenty-one years, Rebekah neither thought nor spoke of them.

The forgetting was not intentional. Maybe the chambers of her mind reorganised in preparation for the new. Things that were new to her crowded in—things such as restaurant dining, dancing, partying, hairdressers, movies, voting and more. When a boy at the Mines Department asked her to a cabaret, she asked him with a feigned carelessness what people were wearing.

“Casual,” he replied.

At home she pulled out her dictionary. She was told to expect music, dancing and a meal. Then she found casual as in dress to find a definition of informal attire. She had her work clothes, then she had her weekend clothes which were jeans, t-shirts and jumpers.

Did casual refer to another category of dress or was it a fresher set of weekend clothes?

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She decided to go shopping and approach a sales assistant. I’m going to a cabaret on Saturday night. What do you recommend I wear?

At least that was not as embarrassing as going into a music store and asking the sales person what they liked or pretending she was looking while waiting for someone around her age to come into the store. When that happened she would watch what music the stranger selected then she would follow suit.

Contemporary music never did happen for her. Her taste leaned towards choir singing and classical. As for reading fiction, it was not until she attended university some twelve years into her new life that she was able to move away from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century classics to venture into fiction representing the twentieth century. By then she had immersed sufficiently into her new life to embark on an undergraduate degree in English.

Twenty one years later when she drove towards her old home at the time of her father’s death, she was going backwards to a life that had fallen away as soon as she left.

She had them pigeon-holed into a small frame labelled delusional. They couldn’t touch her now. She’d learnt so much from her new life that when she steered her car into the street before Annie’s, the presence of a car which she recognised immediately as belonging to a church spy tailing her, was perceived as a joke.

At the kerbside opposite Annie’s house, she stopped the car and turned off the ignition. Through her rear vision she watched the spy get out of his car and walk towards

Annie’s front door. She decided to give him some space so when she approached the front door she discovered the outer security door was locked against her. Again she laughed with scorn at these deluded people who thought their power games were effective.

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It was meeting with Abigail that affected Rebekah the most. There at the unlocked door her sister stood, broken, her hands clasped in front of her, her voice just perceptible in its flat tone and measured words. All spontaneity was gone. Abigail who had a beautiful singing voice, who played the piano by ear, who was naturally gifted with using paints to bring her drawings to life and who had been drawn into a life of submission to male authority and servitude to her parents. Her words to Rebekah on her last night in that suffocating environment, You could get to like this life, played over and over in Rebekah’s mind.

It was too awful. Annie, fresh-faced at eighty three, did not see what Rebekah saw.

In fact her mother’s lack of insight was astounding. For much of her life, it seemed, Annie had pushed any sense of responsibility away from her. David’s leaving home and his early death—the Devil. Rebekah’s rebellion and her decision to leave the life that was planned by others was definitely Satan at work. During Rebekah’s visit Annie stayed close to the church spy, depending on him to protect her from her now worldly daughter.

Was it fear that drove Annie? Perhaps the hardships of her younger life were too much for her to bear. She created a fantasy world of escape from the harsh realities around her, a world that took her into religion. Whatever it was, Rebekah will never know.

It is late summer. The plumbago bushes are in flower and maybe it is a combination of a recent downpour of rain and some humid March weather that has coaxed the blue into a magnificent display. This year a deeper blue cluster catches the eye. It sits comfortably amongst its paler cousins. Perhaps the deeper blue was always there and it is only now that she is able to see it.

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