Crimwife (17 page)

As soon as Shorty got out of jail, however, he went straight to Emma’s flat. According to him, it was as if everything was forgotten and they were happily back together. For five years, Emma lived in a cycle of fear and pity. She still felt sorry for Shorty, but his threats and his nastiness had taken their toll. Emma sent him to jail three times, and three times he came back, as if nothing had happened.

“He would steal my key card and go to the bank at 3 am, when my pay had just been put in. He would empty my bank account and leave me nothing for food or for Julia. Then at 9 o’clock, he’d come in screaming for me to go to the bank.

“We’d go to the bank, and he would demand to know why there was no money in the account. He would make me tell the bank teller that I hadn’t taken the money out. He would go off his head at them, saying they’d better put the money back. When they would come back with proof of the withdrawal earlier that day, he would start screaming. It worked once, but after that it was just humiliation. And poverty.”

When Julia was nearly two, Emma woke up early one morning to Shorty yelling at her for her key card. “He kept saying, ‘Give me your keycard, give me your key card,’ and I said, ‘No.’ He kept saying it, and I got up and he had a plank of wood, ready to go, and he was holding it over my head. I gave him the key card, and after he left, I packed a bag for Julia, a bag for me, and my friend came and picked us up and took us to Mum’s.” Emma left her flat and never returned. She heard later that Shorty moved his mates in and sold off everything she owned cheaply for drugs.

From that point on, Emma cut all contact with anyone in Shorty’s life, including his family and friends. Shorty moved on to heroin and Emma wanted Julia away from all of it. Shorty found a new relationship with a fellow addict, and together they had two kids, who now live with their grandparents.

Even though Julia barely saw her father, Emma says she’s just like him. Julia was constantly in trouble at school, streetwise and crafty. “She was so wise early,” says Emma, “but I don’t really know why.” Julia had only seen her father once since they’d left for good, when she was eight and Emma had relented, taking her to visit. “He was so happy to see us, me and Julia,” she says, and she felt her heart move towards him. “I got out of there, quick as I could. I didn’t want to even think he could control me again.”

When Julia was eighteen, Emma bumped into Shorty on the street. He said “Sorry,” before realising who it was. When he saw her, he asked her to wait. He pleaded with her to give his number to Julia. Julia told Emma that while she didn’t want to know him, she’d call him another time.

Four days later, on Emma’s thirty-fifth birthday, Shorty went to a park near a church. He walked out into the surrounding bush and sat under a tree. He had a big shot of heroin, and died alone.

“I can’t feel responsible for that,” says Emma. “I would’ve when we were together. But not now.”

As for Julia, she’s doing well, considering a drunk relative at one family Christmas told her how she was conceived. “She’s not going to have any part of that side of life,” says Emma. “She’s seen what I went through and there’s no way she wants to be with someone like her father. She’s a good kid. She’s going to have a much better life.”

When you visit the same jail over months, or years, you become familiar with the people who visit at the same time. Elderly parents are in there early. They are notable for the incredulous looks on their faces that they are in such a place at all, waiting to see their child behind bars. They wear expressions of permanent bewilderment, of unanswerable questions. Some tell me that they will be visiting for the rest of either their life, or their child’s. They are resigned to the knowledge, bewildering or not, that all this concrete is now a big part of their retirement plan. Those parents break your heart. Each week you nod at each other, but they maintain a cautious distance. The parents who aren’t there are afraid, indifferent or have been missing for too long, which is part of the original problem.

Siblings are easygoing; the brothers soak up the masculinity, and the sisters count the change for the vending machine and call their children closer. When one sibling is in jail, the others get an upper hand in the family rivalry.

Some prisoners get visits from mates, but they get fewer and farther between, as the years go by.

Then the loyal soldiers, the partners, are there, week after week. I watched their babies grow, and we exchanged smiles, silently, knowingly, cheekily sometimes, as we waited for our eyes to be scanned or the dogs to run past us. I watched and wondered what they told their children when they took them into the visit room, and how they managed to handle the visit and keep the children presentable, attended to and distracted from the reality of their surroundings. We had passing conversations.

The other crimwives always seemed far more secure than I was in their partner’s innocence or at least their love for each other. For them, jail was a barrier that would be overcome, a fact of life, just like working overtime. Suddenly, if his classification changed, his charges were dropped or his sentence ended, I wouldn’t see them again, unless at a coinciding jail visit somewhere else. We each knew our placement could change with a bed shortage or a virus outbreak, so we stayed on friendly but distant terms. We were like visitors to a hospital, with some patients heading to emergency, some to palliative care, and we passed each other from time to time, each in our individual prison routine.

There was only one crimwife whom I grew close to, even though I wonder what happened to a lot of others: whether he really was innocent, and whether the judge saw it that way. Her name was Trina, and she had previously spent time in Mulawa while her partner, Jeff, was next door at the Silverwater remand centre. For the fifteen months that Trina was inside, they’d slept two hundred metres away from each other, never seeing each other, exchanging inter-jail mail and the rarer inter-jail phone calls.

Trina started visiting Jeff again as soon as she got out. Despite her twenty years of drug use and sex work, she’d never been to jail before she met him. She resented him for it, and he resented her for getting out earlier than him. After all, they had shared equally in the spoils for the six months before they were both locked up for break-and-enters. Men in jail will tell you that women have it easier on the inside as well as on the outside. To Jeff, Trina had once again had femaleness on her side.

Trina is a sharp girl with a quick sense of humour. She’s perceptive and smart, and we had a lot of fun together killing time in the waiting room, mocking everything we could about jail and the boys inside, especially our own ones.

One day after a visit we went for coffee and she asked if I would drive her to pick up some belongings. The night before, Trina had had a falling out with her flatmate. I waited while the girls fought it out, then drove Trina’s bags to my house. By the next week she was all but moved in, on a temporary basis, of course.

Sometimes she would be gone for a couple of days, but I still managed to live vicariously through her, because her life was so far from anything I’d ever known. She resembled an overgrown sixteen-year-old, a very street-smart one, even though she was thirty-four. During the day, she looked like an average girl, wearing a t-shirt and jeans, with her hair in a ponytail. She made sure she only surfaced when she was at her best, though, and stayed home when she wasn’t ready to face the world.

But the exceptional thing about Trina was her unwavering ability to keep herself afloat. She survived, one way or another, whatever it took. This fascinated me.

She usually returned home at about 3 in the afternoon, quite presentable and generally satisfied, having been anywhere on earth. She wouldn’t come back unless she had accomplished whatever it was she had set out to achieve. Sometimes she filled me in, sometimes not. She hadn’t announced exactly how long she would be staying, so from day to day I simply enjoyed her company when she was around.

We would have dinner together, then my son would go to bed. At about 7.30 it came time for Trina to decide whether or not she was going out to work. If she’d already made up her mind to go, then she’d shower and begin to get dressed. On the streets, night shift is really the only good shift going. Unless you’re ultra-dedicated, or ultra-desperate.

When on her own time, Trina was actually more of a tomboy. But when she went out for the night on the streets, as she had done for so many years, she transformed into a woman getting ready for a date. She loved organising her outfit and looking beautiful, getting her makeup right, and accessorising. She’d match her shoes. She’d make sure she had everything she required for the work night in her underarm clutch bag. And while she was preparing, she drank no less than a bottle of wine. It was the minimum she needed to face her gentlemen callers. And as she drank, she talked.

*

Trina’s older brother, Jai, had fled overseas as soon as he was able to get out of home. They were two years apart in age and had both lived long lives before they were adults. He loved her, but despised her sex work and her ongoing use of drugs. He’d left her, she believed, right at the time she needed him most. If Jai had stayed, Trina could have left home without running.

Their mother, Pat, was a child victim of a brutal rape, which had left her reputation tarnished in her small hometown. The court reports had stayed in the papers for months, through a trial; and while the men involved were caught, Pat grew up fully aware that the whole town knew exactly what had happened to her. Trina’s grandmother, who had borne Pat at the age of fifteen, told her daughter, “No matter what they whisper about you, no matter what they say, if you think you hear them laughing at you, just keep walking and keep holding your head high.”

Pat had met Trina’s dad, John, when she was nineteen. He had come to their coastal town on a surfing holiday with some mates and, after a couple of weeks, she followed him back to his suburban Melbourne home. Within three months she was pregnant with Jai and, within four months, Trina’s parents were married. Two years later, Trina was born.

From the outside, Trina’s life seemed wholesome enough, and in lots of ways it was. Her father was hard-working and her mother had lots of love to give them. The children were well looked after and had to contend only with their father’s occasional bad moods. They were devout Baptists, and Trina’s earliest memories of church were happy ones, playing with other children. As time went on, though, John became stricter.

He banned any form of junk food. They were not allowed to swim with other children, as it was immodest, and there was no TV or secular music. They attended church and Bible studies several times a week. Often they were not allowed to play with other children at all, even the ones from church. The list of rules at their house grew longer and harder to follow.

When Trina was eight, she made friends with a girl in her street, Jenny. Her father liked Jenny and her parents, so he let Trina play there more than at other friends’ houses. Trina loved it there. They had cupcakes and chocolate. They had a swimming pool, and there wasn’t the yelling and the seriousness that made up her home life. One day, while they were sitting around watching movies, Trina ended up sharing a blanket with Jenny’s dad. As Jenny sat nearby, staring at the screen, her father’s hands were drifting onto Trina.

Trina stayed very still, as if nothing was going on, until he stopped suddenly, as Jenny looked over. Trina knew that she had done something very wrong; she knew her father would be angry, but she couldn’t give up Jenny’s house. It was her only escape from the anger and fear of her world.

Over the next four years, until Jenny moved interstate, Trina stayed too scared to ask her if her dad did the same things to her. She hoped that in a way, by visiting them, she was sparing Jenny and her sisters some of what she went through with their dad. At that time she was still too terrified to speak about it to anyone.

In the end, Trina’s father never found out. When Trina was ten he had a nervous breakdown, as her mother called it, and left the family for three months. When he came back, he was a changed man. He had discovered cocaine and rid himself of religion. Trina’s life changed from long hours in church to long hours sitting in the car outside city clubs, while her father wheeled and dealed, reaching his freshly criminal fingers into as many pies as he could. Trina said it didn’t take long to learn everything she needed to know about life on the streets. When she was twelve, her dad had another breakdown, and while he was in rehab he went back to religion. He returned an even more self-righteous ruler than previously, and kept a close watch on his teenagers. But by the time Trina was fourteen, the family had collapsed. Her father had returned to his cocaine-using friends and the life that went along with them.

By then, Trina had found other outlets besides Jenny’s house, and she’d started smoking and drinking regularly, as well as dabbling in other drugs. The week their father left for good, Jai went to a mate’s place and her mother went back to her hometown. Trina refused to go with either of them and went to live with a girlfriend she had met in the city. She was working in the sex industry two weeks later.

In the early days she made a lot of money. Times were different then, and her clients had money to burn. When the sailors docked, Trina could make $10,000 in a weekend, if she worked hard. She was well liked and moved easily from dancing to stripping and then to sex work. She felt she was finally living a powerful life, her own. She drifted into heroin use and, at fifteen, she was a full-time user, with plenty of money to support herself.

Life changed again for Trina after she met Brad at a bar a year later. He was eighteen and became Trina’s first love. Trina told Brad her history and, instead of turning away, he told her there was another life for her. He was working, nearly finished his apprenticeship, and he said he would help her. Trina detoxed in a clinic and got a job in a shoe shop. She convinced him to move out of home and in with her.

While the two of them lived on love, money got tight and Trina went back to sex work. She also went back to drugs, and Brad went with her, curious and wanting to be a part of her secrets. Then Trina fell pregnant and decided to keep the baby. She got sober with Brad and she quit sex work. Life became a lot quieter for months, but after their daughter Lily was born, Trina hated breastfeeding, and, overwhelmed, started using drugs again almost immediately.

Brad was determined to stay straight. He’d already had enough pressure from his parents, who had discovered his drug use, whereas Trina contacted her parents only when she needed something so desperately she could bring herself to ask them, or when she was sober, both of which were increasingly rare occurrences. At first, her mother travelled to help her with Lily, and her father sent her money, but as soon as they found out she was using drugs, her family backed off. Trina saw her actions during this time very differently from her parents.

“I was working at nights,” she said. “Brad was at home with Lily. I always made sure she had everything she needed. I bought Lily all the toys and clothes, and every night before I went to work, I made sure she had all the food and nappies and whatever else she needed. And I always went home with money left over and a shot for Brad. Every morning without fail.”

Trina said there were long stretches when she was off drugs during Lily’s childhood, but she always went back. Brad, though, was growing more and more distant from her. Trina’s father reappeared in her life, sober and full of helpful ideas. Trina found it hard to reconnect with him; and her father, in turn, grew closer to Brad.

One morning, when Lily was five, Trina came home from work to find her house empty. Her father and Brad had packed up most of it, and taken Lily with them to live with Trina’s mother. When she called her parents to find out what had happened, they told her she would have to fight them in court. Trina figured she didn’t stand a chance, with all of them versus her, so she devoted her time to destroying herself with drugs. She doesn’t remember much of the three years that followed. She knew that Brad was seeing Lily, and that she was well looked after. When she called her, she didn’t know what to say. The betrayal she felt was overwhelming.