Jim stood in front of me. ‘Your past is a little unsavoury.’ He seemed pleased with his choice of word.
‘Unsavoury how, Jim?’ I knew I was not meant to question him. My role was to agree, to be reassuring and give myself up to his wisdom.
‘The spirit of harlotry has possessed you, Barbara.’ He swallowed as he said it.
I laughed out loud. Jim lowered his voice and told me God had shown him this was the core of my problem.
Bonnie and Rachel stood by the door, holding hands. They had changed themselves into pyjamas, the buttons mismatched. They ran to me and I took them into the kitchen. We would not leave today. I made an early dinner and breastfed Ruth and read them bedtime stories while the men waited in the living room.
‘We’d like to pray over you,’ Jim said when I returned. ‘Our faith in Jesus can deliver you from the demon that is destroying your life.’
When I asked Bruce if he agreed with this diagnosis, he nodded and tried to put his arm around me. Jim flicked through his Bible. I remember saying, Fuck it, deliver me. I wanted it over so I could be on my way.
The men stood each side of me. Jim placed one hand on my forehead, the other in the small of my back. Bruce copied him. I closed my eyes. My head hurt. I wondered for a moment about the feel of thorns. Jim began to pray, imploring God to look favourably upon us.
A laugh rose up from my stomach, like the fits of giggling that could overtake the girls. The more I laughed, the harder they prayed. Then Jim shoved me, and I fell into his cold-handed embrace. It was like falling under the water. I went with it, sliding into a place where even breathing was unnecessary.
4
The Australia?
Invercargill, 1974.
Sunlight through late summer leaves, a dried-out lawn and a brick fence. We’d moved to Invercargill the year before, and our back yard was bare apart from one tree. Inside the square-fronted stucco house Mavis was ironing. She’d cranked the stereo up to nine as Glen Campbell crooned ‘Dreams of the Everyday Housewife’.
I would soon be fourteen. I lay on a blanket and thought: I’m not from this place. Not Invercargill or Whanganui before it. And I wondered if I was even from New Zealand. My life felt as empty as the back yard. I remember all this because I wrote it down in a little notebook I took everywhere. I was beginning to think about adoption, what it might mean and why it made a difference.
I felt it should make me different, like an answer to a question I was yet to verbalise. In the facsimile of a family made by adoption, parents work hard to believe you are as if born to them. The law tells you there is no difference. Government-level gaslighting. The Adoption Act 1955 says you are deemed to be the adoptive parents’ child as if you had been born to them.
Around that time, Mavis said, ‘We love you as if you were ours.’ The reply that jumped into my mouth was as dangerous as a bomb: How would you know? Years later I understood the cruelty of my response. A clueless child picking at her scab of infertility. It caused a week of glacial silence, presaging the silences to come whenever I questioned adoption.
When we are young, most of us think our childhoods are normal. Adopting families are as diverse as any other. Conditional and unconditional. How was I to know that in this one my behaviour was the arbiter of love? When I was good, it was down to their parenting, and the warmth flowed. When I misbehaved, it was all in my genes, as if I’d inherited nothing from my mother except her immorality.
To paraphrase Tolstoy, every family is miserable in its own way. But with many adoptions, conditional love plays into an understory of abandonment and rejection. Today they would say I had Adopted Child Syndrome. A kind of psychopathology leading to all manner of negative social behaviour. Back then all I wanted was to escape.
The longing under that tree in the back yard was so intense I thought I had called him to me. Leon. The love god of James Hargest High School. I opened my eyes and he was there, blocking the sun, the boy every girl at school wanted. He knelt down. So far, our courtship consisted of him once taking my hand at the bus stop and walking to band practice. I’d sat on an upturned beer crate in a filthy garage while the boys tried to play in time.
‘Nice music,’ Leon said as Glen Campbell moved on to ‘If You Go Away’. ‘Do you want to go away?’ he asked.
I’m sure I nodded and he suggested Australia. He said it fast, as if that would reduce the immensity of the idea.
‘The Australia?’ My cousin had run away there the year before. It became the latest family secret, spoken in hushed tones.
Leon said he had tickets for the next day. His bandmates were sure I’d refuse. I tried to stand up but my back hurt and he held out his hand. I told him I had $20 from babysitting, and he asked what I was saving it for. ‘This trip,’ I said. ‘When do we leave?’
He smiled with the sun behind him and told me he knew I was different. The plan was to meet at the school gates, walk to the depot and catch a bus to the airport. Back then Kiwis could go to Australia without a passport. But we needed more money.
That
