The Secret Daughter (5 page)

‘But
you
agreed to move in here too,’ I whispered, stung.

‘Because . . .’ Ted sighed and entwined my hand on the table with his. ‘Because one of the things I love most about you is your loyalty, and your optimism, and
even
those damned rose coloured glasses. I’m assuming that you use them on me too, given that you put up with me.’ I smiled weakly, but there were tears in my eyes, because if there was one thing I was still sure of it was that I didn’t
need
rose coloured glasses for my husband. He was genuinely amazing. ‘I did try to talk you out of it, but it was obvious to me that pleasing your Dad meant a lot to you, and eventually I figured I would just go along with it for a year or two to make you happy. But it was never what
we
wanted. And it wasn’t just the house, it was you going to uni, and—’

‘I
wanted
to go to uni, Ted.’

‘Yes, you did. But you didn’t want to study teaching, did you? You wanted to go to the conservatorium to study performance. You told me that the very first time you met me. Your parents convinced you to do the safe course, instead of the brave course. I love your parents. I
really
do. But I don’t think I can listen to you wax lyrical about how wonderful they are any more, not after tonight. What they are, and what they’ve
always
been, are two people who love you more than anything else – but to them, love and control are all jumbled up together somehow. I can’t help but wonder if a part of your Mum’s distress last night was because we didn’t ask her permission to have a baby of our own.’

‘You make them sound like
monsters
.’

‘No, Bean, I don’t mean to. I just want you to look at this rationally. This is a God-awful thing they’ve done.’

‘They said they were advised
not
to tell me.’

‘That’s probably
part
of why they didn’t. But surely they questioned that, as you got older and society evolved enough to realise how unfair that is?’

‘I have to believe that they kept this from me because they really thought it was in my best interests.’

When I glanced at Ted, he sighed and shrugged.

‘I hope you’re right.’

‘But you don’t think I am.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Who was it at these maternity homes – I mean, who actually
took
the babies? Was it doctors?’

‘From what I’ve read, midwives and doctors . . . and social workers,’ Ted added the last words very softly, and even though I’d feared as much, I was instantly defensive and surprisingly angry with him for saying the words out loud. I wanted to rage at him, and maybe I would have, but he cut me off with a hasty qualification, ‘Look, I really don’t
know
about any of this – I just skimmed over an article or two in the news over the last few months. And Bean, of course I struggle to see Megan participating in any evil institutional scheme to rob mothers of their babies. But there really were schemes like that and she
was
a social worker and now it seems that she
did
work in a maternity home. . . I’m just saying that as awful as it is to consider, we’re going to have to keep an open mind about her role in all of this until we know just a little bit more.’

‘Christ, Ted.’ There was just enough weight in that realisation that my emotions suddenly broke free, and the sobs came in an avalanche. ‘Please don’t say these things. Please, just leave it for tonight now. I don’t think I can handle any more than this.’

‘I’m sorry, honey.’ I could hear the echoing waterfall of remorse in his tone, just as I’d heard the way his words spilled forward as he talked about my parents manipulating me. He’d been waiting a long, long time to point that out to me, and maybe he’d pushed it farther than he should have given how upsetting the night had already been. ‘We don’t even have to talk about this if you’re not ready yet.’

‘I think . . . I’m going to have to digest all of this, piece by piece, and it might take a long time.’

‘Yes . . . it might.’

‘When they said they didn’t know anything about her. . . do you think they were lying?’

Ted sighed and nodded.

‘Yes. I hate to say it, but they were
definitely
lying.’

‘I felt like that too, the way Mum wouldn’t look at me. But . . . the whole conversation happened so quickly, my head was spinning.
Is
still spinning.’

‘They knew her age, remember? Meg said your birth mother was sixteen, she said that’s why she had to give you up. They
did
try to quickly move the conversation on, but there’s no doubt in my mind that they just didn’t want to tell you any more.’

‘So they’re
still
lying to me,’ I whispered thickly. It was a fresh punch to the gut to think that this wasn’t something terrible my parents
had
done, but rather, something terrible that they were
continuing
to do.

‘Maybe they’re just going to let you have some time to digest all of this. We can ask them and push the issue a bit more somewhere down the track. It will be much easier to press for those details later on when everyone is calm.’

I looked to the television. The evening news was starting. This was the time when I would normally reach for the remote and turn over to a soap or cartoon or just about
anything
else.

My routine may have changed forever; it seemed that my attempt to avoid the worst of news in the world had failed; the bad news had found
me
and in the most personal way possible.

But the changing of the television programmes was proof that the progression of time continued as it always had – the world had not stopped, although in just a few moments, its axis seemed to have forever shifted.

I tried to sleep, after a few hours of sporadic, confused and disjointed analysis with Ted. I repeated myself a lot. We’d start to talk, and then the conversation would become too painful and I’d insist it stop, only to bring the topic up myself again just minutes later. When he suggested we go to bed, I resisted at first, because I still had work to do and I couldn’t imagine stilling my racing mind anyway. The deciding factor was that he was going to leave the room and I couldn’t bear to be alone.

I lay within the confines of his arms until he was asleep, but I couldn’t even bring myself to close my eyes. Every time I did, flashes of my childhood shot past me; the playful holidays we’d regularly taken, the comforting overnight presence of my mother when I was sick, the patient provision of endless speech therapy for all of those years when my stammer seemed like an undefeatable foe. Instead of warmth and a feeling of unbelievable fortune, now those memories inspired a shame at not even
suspecting
the lie – not
once
.

How could they have kept this from me?

How could I not have known?

I gave up and left the bed when Ted started his deep snoring routine. I made a cup of tea, and sat back down at the table, taking the same seat I’d been sitting in so many hours ago when the doorbell rang. The sun was gone now and it was cold. I pulled my dressing gown tightly around my shoulders. Then I opened the laptop and brought up a search engine, and my fingers hovered over the keyboard.

Where to begin?

I knew that both Mum and Dad had been working at a rural hospital four hours west of Sydney when I was born, in a sleepy rural city named Orange; one which we’d never visited in spite of my curiosity over the years. Every time I had to write a place of birth for an application, I’d wondered about this mysterious place and I’d often asked her if we could go there together, to see the hospital and so she could tell me about my birth and show me the house I first came home to. She always offered the most plausible excuses. I’d never so much as suspected there might be a sinister reason behind her avoidance of that place.

I typed in the word.

Orange
.

And then my hands froze up as I thought about those strange words Ted had introduced me to;
maternity home
. I closed my eyes and pictured a prison-like structure with bars on the windows and faces of pregnant teenagers peering helplessly from between them.

My fingers went to work again.

Maternity
.

Home
.

I clicked search.

There was recent news coverage – lots of it. I clicked on the top link.

Pressure is mounting on the Australian government to apologise to families impacted by the government’s forced adoption policies in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s in Australia . . . Although exact numbers are unknown as records were often destroyed or not kept at all, it is believed that up to 150,000 babies were taken from their mothers during the period, with some commentators calling this an epidemic of unimaginable proportions. Midwives, doctors and social workers—

As soon as my eyes hit the words
social worker
, I hit the back button with a little too much force.

I turned to Wikipedia.

Orange and District Maternity Home.

There were a few pictures of a nondescript red brick building; no bars on the window, no signs out the front. It could have been any post World War Two office block. I skimmed the brief text.

Operating from 1954 until 1982, the Orange and District Maternity Home was a Salvation Army sponsored home for unmarried mothers. It is believed to have housed more than 1,000 young women during their pregnancies, although record keeping practices were notoriously poor. The home is believed to have been a participant in government sanctioned forced adoption practices.

In 1982 the Maternity Home was closed, and the building was repurposed as a ward of the Orange Base Hospital until its move to the new Bloomfield Campus in 2012. The building is currently vacant.

I stared at the photos. The building seemed far too ordinary to have housed such an evil scheme.

Eventually, I closed my laptop and rested my head in my hands. I thought of the first time I left home, when I graduated from uni and decided to take a job singing on a cruise ship. It had been an adventure that I’d loved every second of – after the first night.

But that first night, docked in Sydney in my tiny, window-less berth, I’d felt more alone than I ever had in my life, and it had been terrifying. The enormity of the ship, of the Harbour, of the journey ahead and of the world itself had dwarfed me and I’d allowed myself to become overwhelmed and lost.

It had been a long, cold night of regret and anxiety and fear.

But then, of course, I had left my berth as the sun rose and at breakfast made friends and spent the next few years in one endless party here and there all over the planet.

From the fear had grown courage, and from the courage had grown confidence, and now the stint at sea was a part of the fabric of my character.

I wanted to believe that this long, cold night would grow something beautiful in me too, but I couldn’t even imagine how that could ever happen.

FOUR

Lilly—June 1973

Dear James,

I miss you so much. There’s almost nothing in the world I wouldn’t give just to see you today. This is just a horrible place. It’s cold and it’s miserable and I’m lonely and scared. Yesterday was the worst day of my life . . . until
today,
anyway.

I learned today that the social worker who admitted me is named Mrs Sullivan and I am pretty sure she’s in charge. She is
awful
, James. The way she speaks to me . . . the things she’s said to me . . . just the sight of her gives me chills already.

There is, thank goodness, another social worker. Her name is Mrs Baxter and in that whole day of tears and confusion yesterday, she was the only person who showed me anything like kindness. She actually hugged me when she was showing me around the place, and she told me that things will be okay. She told me that I just need to keep my chin up.

I’m trying James. God, I’m trying.

They don’t call me Lilly in here. They call me Liliana W. At first, I thought it was because they couldn’t pronounce Wyzlecki, but then I realised that they do this to all of the girls. I’m not sure why they do that, but I do know that I
don’t
like it. It makes me feel uncomfortable somehow – I mean, even at school, we at least got to keep our last names. Here, there are no uniforms, but other than that one small thing it’s just like I imagine a prison would be . . . so many rules and restrictions, and
no one
wants to be here.

There are twenty-seven of us confined in the home and we all share a room with at least one other resident. I think I must have lost the room-mate lottery. I’m sharing a room with an aboriginal girl and she’s awful. Her name is Tania J., and although we’ve only had two conversations so far, she’s already made fun of me for my stutter
and
teased me in front of everyone at dinner. I cried and I ran back to my room, but it was only half an hour later that
she
joined me, and when she did, she just turned the light off as if I wasn’t even there.

Tania works in the kitchen – she’s actually in charge of the team who cooks our meals. We
all
have to work. I got assigned to the laundry team, which didn’t sound so bad at first because it meant I’d be away from Tania all day. The thing is, this isn’t a laundry like we had at home; this is a commercial laundry that services the hospital. I could barely bring myself to step inside the room when Mrs Baxter first took me there. Right at the door, I could taste and feel the detergent in the air; it was like a wall of heat and humidity and smell. It’s my job to load and unload the dryers, which I know doesn’t sound all that hard, but they are
huge
. The wet laundry is so heavy, and then the loads of dry laundry are unbelievably hot but I have to empty them as soon as they finish – there’s no time to let the linen cool down. So I was hot all day, like summer on the farm, on those cloudless days when the air is too still and you dream of even a whisper of a breeze just to take the edge off. The scorching wet air that the dryers blast out is what makes the entire room so uncomfortable and it’s my job to work
right there
in front of them. In the first few hours, every time I’d bend to pick up a load of washing and strain to raise it high enough for the dryer’s mouth, dots would swim before my eyes and I’d be sure I was going to faint.