The Styx. Patricia Holland

she comes back from you,” he said when my mother rang to confirm the Mothers’ Day access.

      “She screams for hours every time. I’m so sick of it,” he said. “I’m so sick of the sight of you. What about my needs? You’re so selfish. You haven’t changed. It’s all about you. She doesn’t care who looks after her. I give her everything she needs.”

      “I’m sick of all this messing around. It’s too disturbing, distressing,” my father said to my mother. “You’re not seeing her anymore. At all. Full stop. I will put a stop to this access nonsense,” he said.

      My mother had thought she was on track for access to be reviewed. She was right.

      Rememory 14

      I was still only five years old when my mother found out she had lost all contact with me in a fifty-minute judge judgment.

      My mother had run out of money. The custody case had sucked up more than all her settlement money. Legal Aid wasn’t an option, she was told. She defended herself. She failed.

      I was in the Family Court childcare centre with Sharon “the nanny” for precisely sixty-five minutes. After the hearing, my father stuck his face in the door and said, “Ready,” to Sharon. There was no need to make eye contact.

      He picked me up and shoved me in my wheelchair, didn’t bother to strap me in, and wheeled me into the lift, then along the street a bit, to a coffee shop. Sharon happily trotted after. Food was sure to be on the agenda.

      The coffee shop was tight space-wise, so he backed my chair into a corner where the trays were kept.

      “Don’t bother taking her out of the chair, just give her a bottle,” he said to Sharon.

      When we were out, he usually had Sharon add a double dose of chloral hydrate to my bottles of milk; strawberry milk, he called it. “To keep her comfortable,” he said.

      To keep me quiet and him comfortable, he meant. But I often complied and drank the sickly stuff. Oblivion was my favourite place to visit.

      Sharon ate her vanilla slice with her right hand while holding the babies’ bottle to my mouth with her left. She was concentrating on her vanilla slice, and didn’t notice I’d slipped to the side and was falling out of my wheelchair. Milky pink dribble dribbled from the bottle into my hair, into my eyes, up my nose.

      My father didn’t notice either. He was talking to Psycho Silas on the café’s payphone. “Hi, yep, we won. We covered everything, I think. All the same mantra,” my father said.

      He spoke fast, animated, triumphant, oblivious to everyone in the coffee shop. “Yep, Yep. Unfit mother. Depression. Drugs. Is seeing a psychiatrist. … Yep, yep, the one you said. His report was good. It said she spoke of multiple partners, often talks of life having no meaning, history of taking anti-depressants.”

      Silas must have been commenting, because my father paused. Not for long though.

      “Yes, yep he read that part of the psych report twice; how she talked often about how her whole family were devastated by what happened to her when she was in grade eleven. How she never really got over it. How it changed them all—her mother, her brother, herself—turned them all even more dysfunctional. That bit seemed to be pivotal, I reckon. Made them all out to be soaks, druggies. Damaged.”

      Silas must have got another few words in.

      “Yep, yep,” my father yepped back. “Yep, we argued mentally un­stable. Yep, yep, everything you said. A danger. Sexually promiscuous. Abo alco—we didn’t say the Abo bit, but it was understood.”

      Silas’s cackling cackled down the phone and onto the vanilla slices, but my father was on a roll, and hardly paused.

      “Yep, yep, we said everything you said. Rose keeps changing jobs, a drifter. The access is causing the child stress. Every time she returns, the child is distraught. Too much carting around. Causing every­one stress. Too confronting, too disrupting. Preferable under the circum­stances of the severe disability, for the child to stay in the comfort and security that she knows. With the nanny. And her father. Without any contact, until further notice. Until she sorts herself out—yeah, big joke, you could see even the judge knew that wouldn’t happen. … Yep, he acknowledged Rose’s ‘little job’. Said let’s see if she can stick with it. … Yep, everything you said. I think we included everything, yep, yep,” my father yepped to Silas on the phone.

      There was a short silence this end.

      “No, she represented herself. It was embarrassing. So pathetic. She tried to do the legal speak thing. People were trying not to laugh. She had no idea. Really, totally pathetic. I felt sorry for her,” my father said.

      “Yep, Yep. The judge agreed,” my father continued. “More stable for the child, and safer, to stop the contact temporarily, the judge said. To be reviewed, he said, when—if—the mother sorts her life out. Yep, yep, that’s what the judge said,” my father said. “Yep, she’s gorn for good.”

      I slithered to the floor and my head bounced off the last bit. Sharon had to put her fork full of vanilla slice back on the plate. She dragged me up into my chair and did up the straps.

      People watched and their faces said, “What a good man with all he has to put up with.”

      My father rang my mother soon after that last court case, very soon after, that night in fact. There was a simplicity, a calmness in how he spoke. He had a kindly voice almost.

      “It must be very hard for you,” he said. Then hung up.

      Chapter 3

      Rememory 15

      After my mother left, my life was shit. Survival shit. Sad shit. Sick shit. But when I started school, some things at least, started to change. That first bus trip into school began the trudge of undeathing. My father hated that I went, that he had no say in it. Losing control. It was like history repeating itself one generation along.

      My mother had organised it all. Before she left, she had me registered with the Education Department and, back then, failing death—my death—or protracted medical appointments he’d never bother to make or attend, it was too late for him to change anything. Once I was “on the books” Education Department-wise, I was in the system. I was mainstream. He had to send me. He must have been livid—under the surface, and a bit above.

      My mother had fought and made many enemies in insisting that I get to go to school. She was pretty determined. Quietly. She would probably have even pulled out the racist card if she’d needed it. Every card, if she’d needed it.

      The occupational therapist and special-ed teacher she’d been taking me to were not supportive of me going to school. Or of me having access to an electronic communication board. People always thought I was dumb—less than dumb really—virtually vegetative. They refused point-blank to fill in any of the necessary forms. They were pretty toxic, and very patronising.

      “Hello, Sophie,” they’d over-enunciate as if my hearing had Rett.

      They’d talk the same way to my mother. “Hello, Rose, and how is Sophie today?”

      They said “Rose” in a drawn-out manner, especially the “o” elongated into an “owww” and a downward intonation of superiority.

      They used to say, “Hello, Rose, and how are we today?”

      But my mother replied, “You look much the same as usual, fairly fresh really, government job I suppose …” and on she rambled.

      They weren’t impressed. My mother was getting uppity, they thought. And they were being so nice to her. Nice in an as-long-as-you-keep-to-the-rules way. Social rules, I mean, their social rules, run by “people like them”. All was well as long as Mum knew her place within the racial