Chapter 17

It happened again, two weeks later. A scream woke her in the night. Gab moved into Jack’s room permanently after that, as much as for herself as for him, though she was hardly aware of any reasoning behind the decision. It was automatic, triggered by a stimulus that led to a prewired response, without conscious cognition entering the equation. Just like deferring uni. Gab shivered when she thought of Jack left at home with her mum, enduring a night like the one that had just passed. Imagine if he’d been the one who had woken up; who had found Gina in her room with her pills; who had again heard her sense of the great evil present in their home. Gab wondered if it was true about the evil. Deferring uni—yes, she had done the right thing, definitely.

***

Gina sat cross-legged on her worn cushions, a shrine set up on the coffee table before her. A picture of Jesus sat next to a small, grey Buddha statue (purchased from the local two-dollar shop), while rosary beads and crystals were laid out around the figures. Incense sticks burned in a small pot of sand. Fruit and a few flowers had been laid on the shrine as a gift to the gods and Gina was writing on little, torn bits of paper. Some small scribblings were prayers; she laid them out with the flowers and fruits. On other pieces of paper, Gina wrote words which represented the evil spirits she was casting out of her and her children’s lives (or trying to). Those pieces she would scrunch up and place in the pot of sand, setting them smouldering with the incense sticks. That was meant to banish the visceral dread and despair, projected as evil pressing in on the house, that she felt when darkness began to fall …

Gina had always been difficult, but things were intensifying. Her primary shortcoming was a complete lack of engagement with her children’s needs. It was as if her kids were just too much, so she shut herself off, in her own world of thought, prayer and self-justification. Her narrative on the world both shaped and reflected her unwillingness to connect with her kids or to take on challenges—to persist when the going got tough. And that was because for her, the going was always tough and any additional challenge threatened, she thought, to break her rather than to make her stronger. And besides, she just didn’t want to engage. Her religious sensibilities, her engagement in her perceived ‘spiritual world’, her pronouncements on the state of the universe—all these things were, to her, more important than the flesh and blood, the pulsating hearts and growing minds around her. It was the concrete reality of life that was to her ethereal, and her eclectic world of spirits, forces, gods and ideologies was most real. But the more she absorbed herself in it, the more she lost her grip on reality—or perhaps it was the other way around, or perhaps it was both. She was flesh and blood too, as much as she tried—for whatever reasons—to avoid this fact.

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Her upbringing had not been easy, admittedly. She’d been adopted and, while she had moved into a loving family, she’d still felt inferior to her siblings—not because of anything her parents had done, but because she felt her difference. Her adoptive father had died when she was twelve; her mother Betty, a kindly church lady and diligent housewife, had been her one support as she grew up. After Gina had had Gab, Betty visited the granny flat every day. It was Betty who had raised Gab for her first three years. She had been loving, responsive, nurturing—all the things the small Gab needed. But then Betty’s health had taken a sharp turn, and it was a steep decline. She died when Gab was five, and then Gab and Gina were alone, because Gina, with her difficult personality, had become estranged from her two adoptive siblings.

Gina had always been searching for something more to life, for its meaning, for explanations for the things that happened, as though explanations would make life more manageable. But she didn’t tend to look for explanations in the most helpful places. She was suspicious and superstitious, and made wild connections between unrelated occurrences and minor contingencies. She shaped her own world of cause-and-effect, disconnected from those around her. And she was always the victim. This reflected and perpetuated her sense of powerlessness.

Tony often wondered in frustration why Gina couldn’t just ‘get things together’. How hard was it to get out of that room, to go along to a parent-teacher interview at school, or to a school awards night? But for Gina, it was impossible; she’d built a wall in her mind that entirely devalued those things, and entirely elevated her internal musings in that sunroom kingdom. Besides, the world out there was a big, bad place to her, and she felt much more able to change it by chanting incantations and offering prayers in her sunroom than by stepping out into it. Where does health start and illness begin? Where do difficult circumstances cease to be an excuse, and at what point is someone to be held responsible for their actions and decisions? Was it mental illness or choice? How much agency did Gina have in this scenario?

Labels became barriers to hide behind; it was easier to set up camp under their banner than to press forward. And Gina really did feel powerless, she felt like a victim—there was no dishonesty in that. She didn’t have any sense that help was out there for her, or a willingness to reach out for it. It didn’t seem an option because she didn’t want to change. It was more comfortable to keep things how they were. Yes, she attended doctor’s appointments frequently; so frequently. But strangely, this fed into her spiral. For her children, Gina’s behaviour was problematic and painful. Gab felt responsible to fix it all and she couldn’t. Her mother had become her burden, her care, long ago—before she had the age and maturity to realise that it wasn’t her fault.