The girl is quiet, always has been. Self-absorbed and thoughtful. Resourceful, but she will never dazzle: hers is a slow burn, a satisfaction-in-the-getting-there. Look at the photographs of her as a young teenager; don't forget that she was dead before she had finished her teens. She looks half-way between a boy and a girl, very pretty but with an absence of the girlish flourishes that we were flaunting in abundance, her sisters and cousins. We played around with colours and style, we displayed ourselves all of the time.
The girl was probably a wonderful and generous lover, full of affection and patience. She took her lover's identity with her, secreted it away; in death she protected him. Told no-one. I hope he deserved it; hope he was a lover and not a man who forced himself into her.
There were all of those months, nearly nine months, of having a foetus growing inside her. A time when some women grow comfortable with their bodies for the first time, read it as a remarkable living extension of themselves, less abstract than ever before. The pain is, for once, productive. The girl had all of these changes in her body and she kept quiet about all of them. Pretended that they weren't happening.
This act of violence. Her denial. Submerged, and she didn't fight back, she didn't ask anyone for help. I hope she didn't. It is easier to imagine the disaster as being of her making. If she asked for help and was rejected I don't know what to think.
The girl, before she turned nineteen, died. Close in age to Ena, her grandmother, when she first gave birth to an illegitimate child. This girl became pregnant in the small country town she lived in. She felt the shame of this keenly: I know this, not because she had the chance to tell me, but because of her actions. She told no one, perhaps she even kept it from herself, went without medical supervision, a proper concern for nutrition, and continued to wear her tight black jeans. She killed herself, but it was a subtle suicide: the foetus died at an advanced stage and her body was poisoned with septicaemia. The doctor described it as gangrene, I expect because that was more identifiable, an easier concept for us in the family to understand.
It was too late, and she died in the flurry of emergency. Not for her the ignominy of a botched abortion attempt, or the struggle of single motherhood. She held her secret within her body, enclosed it, as tight and fearfully as you can imagine. Died with her shameful evidence inside her body. That protection from hard truths: who was she afraid of? Following the line of transgressors in the family - women who had sex and became pregnant outside of marriage.
At the funeral, did Ena think about her own, similar experience in 1929? Did she think about her secret. Because it was still her own secret then, and she had held it close and told no-one, certainly none of her children. It was revealed much later. When Julie died, Ena's own illegitimate baby was turning fifty. I plunder my memory of that day, that terrible funeral, for evidence of how my grandmother behaved, for any slippages: of recognition, a return to her own hardships.
At the same time as the girl was poisoning herself, I was, responsibly, attending a family planning clinic for the Pill. I had tried to go there before and got lost driving in circles looking for this clinic. In the heat of Perth's summer, my first urine sample seemed to cloud up before my eyes and after thirty minutes of driving I gave up, secretly pleased that I wouldn't have to answer those questions and go through the interview. I was taking precautions before I needed to; I was still a virgin, but hopeful.
The second time tipped the scales. I was tense; it was still hot, and the nurse was having trouble getting me to keep my feet in the stirrups for my routine pap smear. I was uncomfortable about the prodding and the look of the steel speculum. Her telephone rang; she was angry with me for wasting her time. She answered it, leaving me with my legs spread. It was her ex-husband with bad news: her teenage daughter had run away from home. She cried and yelled and sobbed and, later, remembered me. She let me go, and I was pleased. It was years before I tried that again.
I took a prescription of birth control pills out of that clinic and felt like an adult.
But the difference between me and the girl, apart from less than eighteen months, was that I lived in the city and she didn't. I had access to confidential services: health or otherwise. Women in the country often need to arrange a trip to the city if they want to keep the information to themselves.The gossip mill means that anyone can find out every one of your intentions and your mistakes.
There is a gap in the family now: her place. It is not discussed, but is more potent than each of the other losses, all of our gaps.
She is one of these children and so am I. Nearly twenty years since she
died and we still have not adequately dealt with its gravity.
In this photograph, taken in the same year as the last one, she is absent. It was seven years before she died and yet we all look like babies, so separated from what would come.
There are so many secrets embedded in this photograph it makes me weak.