The Styx. Patricia Holland

so touchy. And there’s the issue of what to do with Soph.”

      My mother had been such an easy mark. He had known she’d offer to stay behind, to take care of things so he could go without the drama and worry of finding someone suitable to take over. I don’t think she would have left me anyway. I know she wouldn’t have.

      They had gone through so much, finding out about my disability. The horror of such a horror is too much for anyone. Too much for her, too much for him, and so beyond too much for me. Fortunately, at the time of finding out about my Rett, no one told me about it, and I didn’t have enough knowledge at that time to put what I heard into context. Back then, I hadn’t put it all together. About Rett Syndrome that is.

      “You deserve a break,” my mother said to my father about the trip. “I’ll stay and look after things here.”

      My father replied quickly, far too quickly. “I’ll ask Si to come with me then.”

      As soon as he spoke, my mother stared at nothing. I could tell she knew she’d been stage-managed. Her eyes had looked bruised.

      Over the phone, in Bangkok, Silas’s voice rose with an excited, spiteful tinge. It smacked of how he resented my mother. “He’s always been a little too smitten with the dusky, Rose.”

      Silas cackled more than a laugh’s worth, as we both heard my father splutter at him, “Don’t tell her that!”

      Although I only heard my father faintly, and I certainly wasn’t fully aware of it then, to my mother, his response said so much. It said it was true. It said there was collusion against her. It said that their doing something like that was a normalised situation. It said her marriage was a sham and that she was not a credible entity. It said she should be careful. And it said that he knew he would have to be too. It was a game-changer, my mother’s diaries told me, years later when I accessed them.

      Rememory 11

      The sea has given up its tempest. It is lying dormant, dark, drinking in my thoughts, refusing to offer me acknowledgement. I awoke with spiders in my hair. They are just hanging out, popped from white sacs. This is not an unexpected visitation. In some spidery breeding cycle, they regularly pop out, daily, nightly, visit in groups, then if no one notices and squashes them, the spiderlings begin to disperse gradually away, hopping from pillow to mosquito net, to wall. They mean no harm. They say hello, never to return. I am sad and feel lonely to see them go. Devastated if they are squashed.

      When my father accused my mother of attempting to kill me, a new lowness of soul was born. I overheard him brag of the court case, brag of how she lost me. I know what happened, yet I still can’t fathom how it could have happened.

      “Yes perhaps,” the judge said in the custody hearing, “but an attempted mercy killing.”

      My father hardly drew a fabricating breath; he wasn’t fazed by this.

      “Oh no, she wanted to get rid of her because she was sick of look­ing after her. She did it for her own selfish needs. And she drinks. Unstable. Not a fit mother,” my father said he said in court.

      This woman who painstakingly sewed me party dresses in Laura Ashley fabric with the softest silk voile collars.

      “She’s mad, the bitch; dresses her up like a doll. She’s off her tree. Unstable. She wears cheesecloth and hangs ’round with hippies. She drinks and spends too much money—bipolar two. And I have proof. See these pictures? Year after year, she’s parading her around in new dress after new dress. She treats her like a show pony. Unstable. Not a fit mother,” my father said. And so did his cronies, and so did their wives, and so did their friends.

      And he bought it. The judge bought it. The judge had judged and had bought into this woven and patched fabrication. The judge who was judged to have the wisdom. Judged fit to wield the power.

      In court, you could see the judge and my father instantly bonded. Over the six and a half days of divorce proceedings they reminisced together. Initially when he was called, and later when he gave evid­ence, my father glowed the confidence of a fifth-generation rural empire hand-me-down. The judge, keen to vicariously escape his own solitary confinements, showed off his rural knowledge, his affinity, looked pleased at being able to drop a term or two in validation of his rural industry-ness. Soul mates. Romancing the bush. Both salt of the earth. Together, salt in my mother’s bloody soul.

      “Sole custody,” the judge said. “Safer for her to stay in the comfort and security that she knows, with the nanny. And her father,” he added almost as an afterthought.

      “Can’t make the property unviable,” the judge said, “for the child’s sake—a child with special needs.”

      “But some financial provision for the wife’s education; should she choose to take it up. Perhaps when, if, she finishes, sorts her life out, the contact could be reviewed. Supervised until then,” the judge said.

      My mother’s friend was a barrister. Even she couldn’t crash through my father and the judge’s bond.

      My mother’s barrister friend knew the gossip. The judge’s wife was a drunk.

      “He is a good man,” my mother’s barrister friend mimicked the sycophants.

      “With all he had to put up with. He never complains. Does all the shopping, stocks the fridge,” my mother’s barrister friend said.

      “He organises and pays for the housework, the washing.”

      “He says nothing as every night she drinks her way through the evening game shows.”

      “He says nothing as her head droops, slumped, spinning into her unwashed stench.”

      “He says nothing as he nightly picks her up and puts her to bed—carrying her.”

      My mother’s barrister friend said she extrapolated the next bit. Imaginative, barristers are.

      “He returns for a dropped slipper, a solitary glass, silently gathers the bottles and even more silently places them wrapped in newspaper in the bin. A soliloquy to tolerance and devotion. He supports her soddened soul. She will never leave.”

      “There is never a mention of rehab,” my mother’s barrister friend said.

      Rememory 12

      My father drove me home after my custody hearing. A ten-hour drive, speeding on a cloud of cigarette smoke and fast food. A couple of hours into the trip he rang my mother.

      “I can’t stop her screaming. Do something will you. Say something. You are so manipulative. You’ve brainwashed her. I’m her father. Tell her she’s going home with me. Tell her she belongs with me now. Tell her she has to, that’s how it is. Tell her to be happy. With me. Now.”

      At first my mother was granted fortnightly access. “Supervised.”

      “Three hours on the second Saturday, and three and a half on the adjacent Sunday. No overnight stays,” the access order said. Too risky. Too unstable, it implied.

      To supervise, my father chose a woman both he and my mother knew. My mother’s mother wasn’t to be trusted: too weak and under her power. His mother couldn’t face it: too weak and under his power.

      He chose a social worker, an ex-girlfriend of Psycho Silas’s. The previous girlfriend of a previous boyfriend of my mother’s. She had never liked my mother. She always avoided looking into my mother’s eyes. My eyes, too. During these access visits, my mother looked like a labrador trying to please. The other woman plumped in the power of the rejected.

      The social worker ex-girlfriend of Silas’s called the shots of when and where we met, and my mother complied. Anything, anywhere, anytime.

      The social worker ex-girlfriend of Silas’s judged the trinkets my mother brought me. She judged the conversations my mother had