THE MEMORY OF SCARS - Josephine Pennicott
I was lucky to have been
killed first.
Just before waking, I see this scene in my mind: Cloverleaf, the Tasmanian property we lived in until I was six, with the early winter sunlight illuminating the sandstone bricks in an almost religious glow. Mist hangs over the isolated, dense valley. Dark gums fringe our backyard. Near me, my two elder sisters lie dead. They embrace each other, gory, in a terrible sleep. I could touch them with the stretch of a hand. I’m too near, because I can see the expressions on their faces when they died.
My throat feels wet and warm. I sense in a terrible knowing that, like my elder siblings, my throat has been cut and I am bleeding into the earth. So strange, this sensation of losing life. Comforting, numbing. There is no pain.
I hear sounds around me I cannot identify. Crashing, breaking, sounds. I can just make out another body on the ground. A quick glimpse of dark hair; the head has been blown to pieces. The odd sounds continue, chopping sounds. Then a low moaning, and screaming. “Oh God it hurts! Oh God!” The screaming continues, but the words now mean nothing to me.
I am dreaming this nightmare scene, I tell myself. I hear a gunshot, smell the burning
fume of gunpowder. Then nothing. Only the harsh laughter of kookaburras, amused invisible
witnesses, as I lie amongst my family bleeding to death.
I don’t have that vision as often as I used to, but when it does come it inevitably means I’m in for a shit day. Today was no exception. Mandy was grizzling, she had us up for half the night with her teething. Kelly was irritable, refusing her bowl of porridge, demanding rice bubbles instead. Peter followed his daughter’s example and rushed about, furious he had slept in and was now late for work.
I went outside to our courtyard garden to smoke a cigarette whilst I drank my morning coffee, still unsettled at seeing Cloverleaf again. My throat felt queer just remembering the scene. The old scar line seemed to tingle and burn with its own life and memory. I touched it as I dragged deeply on the cigarette, listening to the sounds of Mandy crying, and Kelly shouting at her, until I heard Peter screaming at both of them. Good. Let him deal with it. I would have them all day.
I squashed out the cigarette in a pot plant, and tried to quell my rising panic with deep breaths. The morning sun was soothing. The screams continued from inside the house. I watched a spider at work on its web. So tiny, but so full of energy. Building for the future.
The safe morning routine followed. I do a load of washing, keeping an eye on the girls as they watched television. Then I vacuum, and clean the toilet. Anything, dear God, rather than remember that backyard of blood and hell.
Kelly has tomato soup for lunch, while Mandy has pureed vegetables. Kelly whinges of course because she can’t have spaghetti. I finish the buttered toast that she doesn't eat, instantly feeling guilty. I’m getting so fat. Mandy sleeps for a short time after lunch. Heaven! But paradise is interrupted by the sound of the phone ringing.
“Hello?” I am irritated, and terrified Mandy will wake. Silence.
“Hello?” I can hear breathing. The caller is listening. I drop the receiver, feeling threatened. This has been happening a lot lately. Now Mandy is crying. Whatever arsehole was on the phone has woken her. Her screams will go all the way down the street. I long for my cigarettes, but reject the idea. I have to answer the crying. Who keeps calling me? I wonder as I head wearily towards Mandy’s nursery. It isn’t the first time they’ve woken Mandy. I had forgotten to take the phone off the hook. Fury pumps through me at the interruption to my baby’s sleep and the peace of the day. I think if the nuisance caller was there in front of me I could kill them.
I am rougher changing Mandy than I normally am. Pulling her nappy up tightly, I look with displeasure at her red, shrieking face.
“Shut up!” I scream, pushing her. “Shut the fuck up!” Instantly I feel appalled as she screams harder. Oh God, she is my daughter and for a moment, just a moment, I wanted to hurt her. To make her stop crying, I wanted to push my fist into her face.
I am revolted at myself. I cradle her gently crying, “I’m sorry, Mandy! Mummy's sorry!” The scar around my neck tingles. My mind won’t let go of the silent knowing on the other end of the phone. “I love you Mandy. Mummy’s so sorry.”
I hate myself. I hate myself.
Yes, they’re always shitty days after I’ve woken up to Cloverleaf.
Scars are a natural part of the healing process. It must be remembered the more the skin is damaged, the longer it takes to heal, the greater is the chance of a noticeable scar.
It was a hobby of mine for a time, collecting information on scars. I wrote about them in notebooks, which I illustrated with photos ripped from magazines or printed off the Internet. I still like to read through my journals, but only when Peter’s not around because he’d only try to take me back to the counsellors for behaving morbidly. I’ve learnt there's some things you can’t say to Peter because it upsets him too much. Like the visions of Cloverleaf I still have occasionally, or the tingling, throbbing sensation I get around my old scar line. It’s essential to protect Peter’s peace of mind from these facts, lest he thinks I’m an unfit mother
to bring up his children.
The phone rings again, startling me, but it is Peter. He’s ringing to tell me he’s going to be working back late. His call barely registers. I still feel sick at my momentary lapse when I wanted to hurt Mandy. I force my mind onto dinner. Grilled chops, frozen vegetables. Peter will no doubt complain, but I’m too tired to cook anything more complicated. It’s an effort to even open a packet of vegetables.
Of course Kelly complains about the mashed potatoes. So, giving in to her, I cook oven-baked chips for her to eat with her chops. I eat mechanically, one eye on the television, making a mash of my peas and potatoes. So tired I can hardly think.
When he returns that night he smells of her. He hasn’t even bothered to wash off her perfume. I am perplexed, trying to place it. Floral, classic. What sort of woman is she? Not me, I realise. Not me with my fat spreading arse, screaming kids, dropped tits. Not me with a scar around my neck which has to be covered to avoid embarrassing questions. Not me reeking of cigarettes who can barely go outside the house without shaking. Not me with the shockingly weird childhood and an inability to orgasm. No. This girl would be smart, savvy. She would have intelligent blue eyes and a Cate Blanchett haircut. She would listen, nodding sagely to his complaints about his family, his troubled wife, how trapped he felt. She would never forget the pill so he wouldn’t get caught. As he talked in the pub after work, she would move closer to him, her lips moist with her drink. “Poor Peter,” she’d say. “She’s obviously imbalanced. Come back to my flat, Peter, and fuck me.”
Then, when she wasn’t opening her legs for my husband, I was convinced she was phoning me from her office, watching him. A small smile upon her face, as she listened to the sounds of my children’s screams.
Kelly, at five, has learnt not to ask questions regarding my past. Once she tried to
interrogate me about where her grandparents were. Peter’s parents, Elly and Robert, had recently moved to Queensland, and Kelly was obviously trying to replenish her gift supply of toys and sweets.
“Mummy, where’s your Nanny and Poppy?” Her question, so innocuous, had a life of its own. It flashed through me like lightning, turning me to charcoal and ashes.
“They’re dead, Kelly. They both died a long time ago, when I was about your age. They’re in the same place as Lester, our old cat.”
Were they? I had no idea what resting place my parents had ended up in. Hell? I could never imagine them reunited with my sisters in Heaven.
Another time I had come in from the shower, and was sitting on the bed drying my hair when Kelly touched my throat.
“What’s that, Mummy?”
An individual’s age and the location on the body or face affects how a scar forms. Younger skin tends to overheal and makes strong repairs which results in larger, thicker, scars.
It is the fashion these days not to lie to children, but some truths remain too dark, too terrible to be disclosed. “Mummy had a bad accident when she was a little girl. She tripped and cut herself on glass.”
I have to tell her lies to protect her.
A stranger returns home in Peter’s body. This interloper says he’s leaving me. Not for the office girl of my fantasies; instead he’s moving in with his sister’s family while he figures out what to do. It’s just temporary, he tells me as he folds one shirt after another into a suitcase, as if the word temporary somehow makes it more bearable. I watch him closely as my world explodes. Freshly ironed shirts that have taken me forever to iron, suddenly getting creased in a suitcase.
Kelly is crying in her bedroom. I’m sick to death of her incessant moaning about her
dinner, her unrelenting cries: “Where is Daddy? I don’t want you! I want Daddy! I hate you! I wish you were dead!”
I hit her hard on the backside, causing her to scream and try to run away from me. Then I pull her by the hair towards me. Her bright red face and screams bring life to my body. I enjoy seeing my daughter’s pain and fear. “You little bitch!” I scream. A desire to pound her head against the wall floods me. “Don’t you ever speak to me like that again! I’ll kill you if you speak to me like that!” I drag her to her bedroom and throw her inside. Then I return to the kitchen, satisfied, to find Mandy screaming in her bouncer. “Shut up!” I scream into her face. “Shut up, you piece of shit. I’ll kill you!”
It would be so easy to do it. Kill them both and then myself. Just the thought of getting a full night’s sleep seems worth it to my aching body and brain.
I sit at the table smoking cigarette after cigarette, listening to the baby scream, feeling an anger move inside me, ancient and thick with scar tissue.
Dr Regan Packer looks like a doctor on a television soap. Young, attractive, short dark hair. More like an actor than a medical person, as if life has begun to imitate art. She’s so calmly efficient as she weighs Mandy. I can see myself clearly through her eyes. I’m around the same age, but look about ten years older. I had dyed my hair blonde from a packet dye in an effort to cheer myself up a few months ago, and it’s now dry and artificial looking. I’ve put on weight and all the clothes I wear are designed for comfort rather than style. I look like a stereotypical actor playing the “frumpy mother” who has let herself go. I envy Regan Packer for her calm, gentle, movements. I want a fat doctor. I want a doctor who doesn’t expand the wriggling worm of self hatred inside me into a huge, suffocating serpent. It’s too easy to imagine the contempt hoarded up in that soothing bedside manner for this frumpy housewife with her bawling baby.
“Well, she looks healthy enough,” she says, making a few notes inside a manila folder. “Any other problems?”
I think it would be beyond this paragon to understand the darkness I am carrying. An image comes to me of her relaxing voice barely altering as she makes a phone call to arrange to have my children taken away. All I know is this simple truth. I love my children. I cannot live without them.
I am dreaming, walking through the sandstone house that I grew up in. Cloverleaf. There are objects that appear to have significance, for each one I pick up and examine closely. An old stuffed bear, a candle with a burning flame, a small yellow glove with a bright red diamond pattern. Fear creeps through me when I spot the yellow glove. I become aware of someone else in the room. I spin around. Terror pumps through me. It is my mother. She is sitting before the fire, her long dark hair covering her face. I am shocked by how young my mother is. It does not seem possible that she could have been that young after bearing three children. She is trying to hide something from me, trying to burn it in the fire. Curious, I tiptoe closer. Hair, it is human hair she is burning. She has a bucket filled with clumps of human hair.
“What have you done, Mother?” I cry.
She looks at me with eyes of anguish. “Don’t go out the back,” she says. I turn around to see the kitchen door opened by invisible hands.
“You don’t want to see what is out there!” Her voice is scratched with pain. I float towards the door. Have to know, have to see. I look out into the early morning frost of the yard and see the bodies.
I see myself lying on the ground. Above me as I lie bleeding to death is a pale blue sky, with drifting clouds. Lying near me, in a veil of long brown dresses and white aprons, in two pools of blood, are my sisters. Except now that I look closer, I see that they are not my
sisters. They are my daughters. The kookaburras laughs as I begin to scream.
The phone shrieks through the kookaburra chorus. I hang between worlds, sick and disorientated, unsure if the noise is bird or machine. I reach for the receiver quickly, terrified it will wake the children. It is still dark outside.
“Hello?” Silence. The sounds of breathing, of the caller listening, fill my awareness. I am still naked and raw from the dream. My nervous system cannot take the invasion of this sly breathing. Irrationally, I know it to be her, phoning to see if he is with me, taunting me with silence. I hang up, screaming “FUCK!” as I hear Mandy crying. In that wild moment I could kill anyone. I could rake the walls with my nails until I bleed. I could kill the anonymous caller, and also Peter for abandoning me, for his infrequent phone calls. Oh yes, I could easily kill Peter for his tears, his guilt, his affair, for leaving me with two screaming children. I could kill my own children.
This last thought horrifies me. I begin slapping myself around the face, screaming, “I hate you! Why didn’t you die back then you ugly stupid cow! Why didn’t you die!” I go downstairs, grab a steak knife from the kitchen drawer and begin cutting myself, slicing deep gashes into my arms, watching the blood flow, relishing the pain, feeling excited at the thought of the new scars I was creating. “I wish you were dead, you fucking fat bitch! You don’t deserve to live!”
“Mummy, don’t!” It is Kelly. She is standing in the kitchen in her Barbie pyjamas. Her little face is creased up with fear. “Please, Mummy! Stop hurting yourself!”
I look down at my arms, drenched with blood. There is a small pool of blood on the kitchen lino. Kelly is shaking me and I see myself in her quivering body. I know her deep sadness as she recognises a parent trying to self-destruct. It’s been a long time since I have cut myself to make the scars. Dear God, is Kelly’s face the mirror of mine when my parents moved towards me with the knife so long ago? Did I cower in a kitchen corner, eyes filled with horror, screaming for help while my parents pulled me outside to cut my throat? I knew my sisters had fought back, alerted - as the police believed - by my screams. Their arms and hands had been covered with defence wounds as they fought for their lives. But had I, unlike my sisters, failed to sense the danger that was my parents? Stop. I could not afford to revisit the past. There are some memories too terrible to contemplate, lest the dark power they contain splinters you into a thousand lost fragments.
“Put down the knife, Mummy,” Kelly says again. She has the eyes of an old woman.
Later, after I have fed Mandy, I sit with her on my lap looking at her drowsy face. Sobs burst from my body. I cannot bear to contemplate life without my children. If I go to the police or hospital and confess my violent urges, reveal my past, I know they will take them away from me. My children are the reason for my existence, they are all that gets me up in the morning. My throat burns whilst the scar tissue threatens to explode.
It’s not easy to escape murder, to leave the trail of blood behind, but if you want to survive, sometimes you have to. You move interstate, forge new identities, have no contact with anyone from the past. Have no contact with anyone in the present. Ask me no questions stranger, and I’ll tell you no lies. I would never forgive my parents for what they did, I would never understand, so it was much easier to try to forget them. Let them fade into nothing with time. I hated them with a passion that fuelled me, but there remained unanswered questions. Why did they isolate us from society so much? Educate us at home? Why did they dress us in those horrible old-fashioned long dresses? Why did they write that poetry the police found all over the house? Their awful, amateur poetry. Only a few copies of their stinking book lingered in second-hand junk shops now. Sentimental, cliche-ridden lines filled with their love for us. Then, darker questions... why did they kill themselves in the way they did? It was methodical. Sadistic. He shot her in the head after they had cut our throats, then chopped off his own hand on the woodpile before shooting himself. Throughout my entire life there had been no answers to the questions. There was only pain, ignorance, and a throat burdened with scars that burn and remember.
You move forward. Somehow you cope, the new identity struts the stage and you come to believe your own lies. You turn to counselling, deep tissue therapy, Reiki, past life regression, even conventional religion. But the church provided no answers for me - their God was an angry God who loved to kill children and incite parents to kill. The God, in fact, of my parents.
Having children of my own helped initially, but now they stared at me with the eyes of my sisters. Grey, flat pebbles of death. Peter has gone. The silence on the phone has claimed him, and I am left fostering the inheritance of my parents. Their blistered, vile legacy. Their Medea smile.
Days pass. Agonising days, slow days marked by my beating heart and my palms streaked with sweat. And Kelly’s screams: “I don’t want sausages! I want fish fingers! I want Daddy!”
Mandy screams and grizzles, looking upon me with hate for bringing her into this world of pain where white sharp teeth push through soft gums.
I sit by her crib late at night, watching her sleep. Her minute mouth and nostrils. So easy, too easy to kill a baby. I could cover her sleeping face with my mouth. Breath stealer. I feel the whisper of my parent’s ghosts as they stand near me, silent witnesses to my dark imaginings. So easy. Too easy.
We visit Dr Regan. She looks cool and crisp in a white shirt and long, pale green skirt. Mandy grabs at the string of pearls around her neck. She smells of lemons. Mandy is measured, weighed, jabbed, and recorded.
“How did you get those?” the question takes me by surprise. I look down. She is pointing
to my arm covered in scabs and scars from my self-cutting. My mind is blank. I had pushed
my sleeves up in the warmer weather, thinking she would be focusing exclusively on Mandy. “I cut myself.”
“Well, I can see that. Are you okay, Renee?”
My cue. All I need to do is say the words. I look at her helplessly, knowing once the words are released, the warm bundle I hold in my arms will be taken from me. Kelly, with her old woman’s eyes, will be taken from me. The idea is not entirely unappealing. I picture leisurely sleep-ins, extra money, no tantrums over dinner. But my children are my life. How could I do that to my own children? But a horrible voice whispers inside me. My God, how can I not?
“Renee?” She is waiting for me to speak. The phone rings, slicing through my dilemma. I am forgotten, dismissed.
Walking home from the bus stop, I feel ashamed. The scar around my neck itches unbearably.
I am mashing potatoes for the children’s dinner that night when the telephone rings. It is Peter on his mobile, right outside the door. I have been unable to hear him knocking over the sound of the television. For a wild moment as I unlatch the door I imagine he has returned to us, but the instant I see the detached, faintly hostile expression in his eyes my hope evaporates. He lights up when he spots the girls. I light up in the kitchen, knowing he detests smoking in the house.
“Can’t we come and live with you, Daddy?” Kelly asks a few times. I shoot her a look of dislike which Peter catches. “Once I’m settled in you can come and visit,” he promises. I hate him then. I hate him for his casual promises to his children. His new home, his new life. His girlfriend. I hate him for turning up unannounced and catching me looking like a slattern, with greasy hair and no make-up. I hate it that the house is a mess with kids’ toys everywhere, dishes piled in the sink, stinking piles of washing on the floor. He has come to
collect some computer software. I ignore him and dish up the girls’ dinner.
“I don’t want stew! I hate stew!” Kelly screams as I order her to the table.
“Shut up, Kelly. Eat what your mother cooks. Well, I’m off then.” Peter puts his head in the doorway, a guilty expression on his face. The penny drops. His new woman is waiting outside.
I walk him to the front door. Parked across the street I can see a young woman in the car. She looks about 19.
“Is that her?”
He nods. I stare. She is not as attractive as my visualisations suggested. She senses my gaze and our eyes connect. Dark hair, red lipstick. She is the first to look away. I stand at the door smoking, watching Peter walk towards her.
Back inside the house Kelly is still screaming, making Mandy cry.
“I want Daddy! Not you! I hate you!”
“Eat it!” I scream. She cries harder. Fury erupts in me. “Eat your fucking stew!” I push her face into the hot meal. She screams, trying to get away from me. I start throwing plates and cups around the kitchen, breaking them. Kelly’s face is covered in stew and she is howling. I grab her, she kicks and tries to fight, but I pull her hair and drag her to her bedroom. I throw her on the bed and press the pillow against her face. “Shut the fuck up or I’ll kill you, bitch!” The desire to silence her, to break her small bones is throbbing within me. It would be so easy and satisfying to shut her up forever. I press the pillow tighter.
Later that night when the house is still, I dig out from my wardrobe the suitcase that holds the key to my past. There it is, the small white book, the badly drawn illustration of a house with sheep grazing, and a crow perched on a fence. Cloverleaf, drawn by my mother. The print run of the book was 420. This was a copy I picked up in a Melbourne bookshop and kept hidden away. It is a book of second-rate sentimental poems written by my father. After the murders there was a small demand for his book by ghouls and amateur criminologists. Tucked inside the jacket is the only photograph I have of my family. It was taken for us by our cousins who have long since disowned us. There we are in black-and-white in the back yard of Cloverleaf. We look like beings from another era. My parents are standing to the rear, my father looking very young despite a long dark beard. His expression is blank as he stares into the lens. My mother’s hair reaches to her knees. On this day she had worn it in two very thick plaits.
For some reason, I remember that afternoon clearly. My cousins had arrived from Hobart bearing the forbidden treat of sweets. I had been frightened of these strangers and had hidden under the house and had to be dragged out by my father. My father had overseen this family reunion with a disapproving eye, smoking his pipe, quoting from the Bible which made my cousins giggle. I failed to realise what an odd sight we must have looked to my sophisticated city cousins. My sisters and I always wore floor-length brown dresses with white aprons, and neat brown scarves tied around our hair.
I stare again at the photographs as the scar on my neck throbs. Three little faces, three innocent little girls. It suddenly hits me how much I resembled Kelly.
I sit all night reading the poetry book, warding off sleep, reading poems with titles such as “Imperfect World”:
Tasting
Death.
I hold my roses in my hand,
in my mouth
To protect them
Blooms fall - we become white perfect bones
Staring for eternity at the
stars...
Words have too much power. Even badly written words. As they create, they destroy.
I was lucky to have been killed first. They must have been more tentative, didn’t cut as deeply. But what triggered my parent’s bloody rampage? I suspect it was my mother who cut my throat. My father was a master of death. He would cut the heads off chickens, slice through pigs’ throats. Death always surrounded us at Cloverleaf. Chicken beaks and claws on the ground. Kittens drowned in buckets. Slabs of pigs hanging from great hooks in the kitchen.
All night I sit in my cold, silent house crying out for meaning to ancestors. Too frightened to close my eyes, because Cloverleaf is waiting for me. I pace the floor, cry, pray, smoke, study the poetry and photograph. My throat is on fire.
There are not many things that disturb Dr Regan’s cool facade. Even the sight of an hysterical woman in her surgery who has not made an appointment, complete with wailing baby in a stroller and a frightened little girl. She overrides the receptionist’s refusals to my heated demands and ushers me inside her surgery. I leave Kelly sitting on the floor, and wheel Mandy in. Words can heal, create, destroy, take life. This is my only chance. There is a half-empty coffee cup on her desk..
“What is it, Renee?” she asks. I stare at her, hearing the thud of the axe as it fell so long ago at Cloverleaf. The mocking hilarity of the kookaburras. With shaking hands I undo the scarf around my neck to reveal the red, raw scarline which has been itching and burning for days. Will she understand?
“Please,” I whisper. It feels like I am talking through the scarline. I have become the scar.
Misformed. Grotesque. I have a history, a narrative. I am encasing a horror of circumstance. A marking of my soul.
“Please help me. I’m scared I’m going to kill my children.”
Her face creases up, and I fear her disgust. She lets out a cry and moves towards me, she holds me in her arms.
I am sorry, Kelly. The words, the telepathic apology goes out to the future. My scar line itches unbearably with the secrets it contains. I have lanced through the tissues and the words seep out like pus. Perhaps now I can be healed.
Across my throat, tears begin to slowly ooze.
THE END
Please note that permission to publish stories from the Scarlet Stiletto Awards 2002 online has been expressly granted to Sisters in Crime Australia Inc. You may not republish, reproduce electronically or in paper form, or otherwise make use of these stories without the permission of the author.
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