Hope Street: A memoir of Multiple Personalities; creating selves to survive

By Rhonda Macken

From the harsh reality of war a father’s PTSD is borne, casting his child into a continuum of torment and profound terror. This is the story of her survival through the power of hope and of imagination. More than a memoir, it is the story of the protection of the Self through Multiplicity.

Offering a compelling and important glimpse

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publicious Book Publishing
• Release date: Dec 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9780648158516

Rhonda Macken

When not on caravanning adventures, Rhonda spends her time writing words and music. She currently lives in Sydney with her husband and an uninvited gaggle of brush turkeys.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

He is sweating, feeling listless in the tropical heat that swarms around his body like invisible honey, covering him as he crouches in the kunai grass. He hears the rats moving, searching for food on the floor of this grass forest, but he is ready. They can smell the blistered flesh that sits within the boot leather, laces long gone, socks worn to threads barely covering the open sores that don’t heal.

The valley floor is long and flat, creating a vast plain of threading rivers. The mountains rise like watchtowers, binding the water to a path that moves in a murky band. Snow blends with the lush, wet green foliage creating a purity that defies the trauma of the valley.

His shirt is drenched, the humidity suffocating as he crouches in silence. Waiting for any changes in the sounds. Rats? Japanese soldiers? Move? Attack? His ears are pricked and his skin is ready.

She screams as her father, bayonet fixed, comes running towards her. Then she leaps, wriggling under the car, lying on her side. Silent. Darkness presses her in as she waits, like him, for a sound. He’s as silent as a snake that moves in the long kunai grass with firm direction towards its prey.

She feels the point of the blade on her back; frozen in terror, her mind fills with images of her body being stuck through. But she remains still, knowing that to show terror would mean certain death.

Get out of there you vermin! You filthy Jap.

She has to obey, sliding her body across the greasy concrete of the garage floor, pushing herself up to the full height of her thirteen years. She runs, confusing the enemy with unexpected bravery. He’s everywhere at once; the roof of the car, the bonnet, yelling. Lunge and twist! Lunge and twist!

Each time she runs he’s in front of her, bayonet menacing. She moves slowly backwards keeping her eyes securely on him, grabbing the pitchfork with two hands, raising it above her head.

He laughs. Come on then vermin. Lunge and twist! Lunge and twist!

She takes her arm backwards, holding the pitchfork like a javelin, feet secure, then hurls it as hard as she can at the monster. He jumps aside and stands triumphant, wiping the sweat of the tropical summer from his face then grabs her, the acrid smell of angry sweat filling her nostrils and heaving her stomach.

I’m taking you prisoner you stinking coward. Move! Move! He pushes her ahead of him, the butt of the rifle bruising her back, prodding her forwards. But she remains solid, walking ahead of him.

She feels her mind switching, another part taking over. It’s Bronwyn, who can remain calm through anything. Her eyes close as she whispers: His eyes! I must move inside his steely blue eyes. Got to see things as if I’m him! The Judge has joined them.

Without warning the brown wooden butt of the rifle is against her skull. She falls, then picks herself up. She must remain silent at all costs. The fly-screen door bangs shut behind them, the sound echoing through the pain in her head as she moves slowly through the lounge room, tripping on one of the glass doors that separates this room from the entrance hall. It vibrates then settles. The ducks on the wall watch her as they fly to nowhere. Again he prods, this time with the blade and she remembers the redness of her blood as it dribbles down her back.

Toward the laundry! Why? She must not drift into her fear, but remains behind his eyes. He pushes her in, slams the door and she sighs as she hears his careful footsteps moving up the hallway.

He’s going towards the bedroom! She thinks of her sister Kate crouching behind the door or under the bed. He said he was going to cut something out of someone’s stomach. Lunge and twist, he said.

Kate!

She turns the handle and creeps out.

Search and destroy. Lunge and twist! His whispered memory is audible above the silence. Listen for sounds. Attack."

His hands are slippery on the polished brown handle. Watch the left. To the left! He lunges forward, the blade crashing into the bedroom door. A cutting scream as Kate is thrust into the terror.

No! Run Kate. Run!

He turns on her. Shut up you coward!

She drops to the floor, suspended in a moment of black silence. She feels skin on her hand. Soft skin. Her sister’s hand. She cries silently. They can hear him in the bedroom lunging into the beds, the thick blade slicing cotton and down.

They crawl, then run, their crazed father chasing them, his screeching battle cries splattering the air. She feels herself pulled downwards, her sister whispering into her ear.

Get down. Quickly!

Squeezed in against the prickly green of the couch they wait. Silence. The back door slams shut.

He’s gone outside. Quick. Where’s Mum!

She grabs Kate’s hand, running up the hallway, into their mother’s room. But the snatches of moonlight don’t reveal her, alive or dead.

Where are you Mum? Where are you! The cupboard door’s open. They run to her. A fetal ball, trembling, crying.

She wants to shake her. You can’t be like that Mum! You’ve got to be big!

We’ve got to get her out! Kate whispers.

They drag her from the cupboard, struggling to lift her onto her feet, then creeping carefully through the house, the silent air broken only by the father’s mutterings.

Slowly forward. One step. Look. Another. Look. Gun alert, bayonet ready. Soft flesh. Not bone! Never get it tangled! It’s him or me! Aim. Lunge and twist. Hole in the blade. Air in when I pull it out. One step---

They creep down the hallway, Kate leading their mother like a small child. Rhonda, the younger child, holding on tight to Kate’s skirt. With the blood-curdling cry of battle he runs through the kitchen towards them, plunging the bayonet into the kitchen door as they flee towards the front entrance. The blade is stuck but Rhonda, on the end of the line, is grabbed, his fist gripping at her arm.

Destroy. Kill or be destroyed.

She bites savagely into his leg. He releases his hold.

I’ll kill you, you filthy vermin!

She scrambles up, running towards the front door and into the air as she hears him roaring inside like the monster that she knows he is. Kate pulls her out and down the path to the street, where she drops into the safety of her sister’s voice and arms.

CHAPTER 1

Let

me introduce my father, Howard Small. He’s tall, just over six feet, long face and eyes the colour of bright topaz. He has brown hair and a friendly smile. His hair was quite thick but over the years has disappeared leaving a shiny patch on top that’s gradually tanned to match the rest of his rugged olive skin. He speaks with an Aussie drawl that betrays his lack of education and provides part of the ammunition that my mother hurls at him when she feels the confusion rushing upwards. His legs are strong and stick out below the old shorts that he wears around the house and the garden. They’ve got bits torn out in several places and are covered in grease and grass stains. He rarely wears underpants at home and his testicles often peep out through the cracks in his shorts. Another piece of ammunition for my mother to throw at him. He keeps to himself a lot when he’s at home, pottering in the garden or playing with his tools and paint pots in the garage. Later in his life he’s taken up mosaics, spending hours arranging the small brightly coloured tiles in playful patterns that ultimately become table tops.

Most of his garden is a patchwork of shaggy trees and shrubs fighting the weeds for a glimpse of the sun, but the sweet peas and dahlias are different. His sweet peas, his dahlias that he tends with care and harvests with pride. He grows the sweet peas along Kelly’s fence, climbing up and clinging to the wires that crisscross the palings and on spring evenings their perfume covers the fear with a thin film of safety.

Occasionally he tries his hand at growing veggies. Especially chokos. He’s the only one who likes them but he cooks them anyway in great numbers, steamed, boiled, baked. Even the dog can’t swallow them.

Howard looks funny in his pinnie, an apron made from Uncle Bob’s old pyjamas, but he wears it comfortably. He loves to cook, but his favourites are tripe and lambs fry. Tripe with chokos, tripe with lumpy white sauce, lamb’s fry with chokos and tripe. The poor dead things just sit on the plates looking up at us.

About once a week he brings home seafood from the Sydney fish markets where he works. For years he was an auctioneer, leaving home at three in the morning, selling, calling the prices from the auctioneer’s box, his coat covered in scales and fishy smells. Worked his way up, he did, from auctioneer to manager, which was good because then he brought home lobsters and crabs, oysters and fish and he and I would share them.

My father rowed for Leichhardt in his younger days. He’s a bloody good athlete.

Strong and resilient. That’s what it says on his army enlistment papers. Sergeant Howard Small. Strong. The war didn’t happen until he was in his mid thirties. They sent him to New Guinea.

He might have had strength in his body but his mind didn’t do too well. Shell or Battle Shock they called it then, PTSD they call it now. They didn’t treat it. Just kept sending them back into the jungle to fight until they were empty of stuffing.

Then they sent them home ‘unfit for duty. Unfit to hold down a job.’ Life ruined. Wife and children raped and terrorized.

If I place my footsteps upon his grave will he dance within the shadows of my dreaming? Or will he be so dead as to never know the vibrations of my dreams?

New Guinea

It’s oppressively hot. The kind of heat that soaks through flesh and tenderizes bones. In the field hospital just outside Moresby the sweat’s even thicker but most of the men don’t care. Their bellies and hearts are empty of hope and their minds of reason. They keep coming, soldier after soldier with wounds and tremulous hands.

A small electric fan ploughs its way through the air, a nurse in her twenties standing in front of it just long enough for the water to stop running down her face.

Nurse: to the orderly: Send the next one in.

The tall thin man walks unaided to the door of the doctor’s room.

Dr: Come in.

His eyes dart nervously.

The doctor gestures. Sit down soldier. Howard Small?

He nods.

Shivering and vomiting? Malaria eh, and it doesn’t go away mate. Stays with you for years. The soldier looks away.

Last time you were here you saw the psychiatrist didn’t you?

He doesn’t answer.

Yes, he’s written here: ‘Marked tremor of hands. Stomach turns over when he smells anyone near him and he feels like vomiting. Nervousness when meeting people and feels as though his stomach is going to fall out.’

The soldier shifts in his chair, looks up and the doctor is taken aback by the blueness of the eyes that stare at him, seemingly unconnected to the tall thin body that houses them. His bronzed face is stony and the only life displayed is in the tremulous fingers resting in his lap.

Dr: Better send you back to him I think. He gestures to the door. John will take you there.

The orderly takes his arm and leads him through the humid corridors to a small room at the back of the ward.

John: Here’s Sargeant Small to see you doc. He turns to the soldier. You’ll be ok. The doc. will look after you.

Their eyes meet, the kindness sending a twinge of memory into his mind.

S. Small: Thank you. He walks in and sits down.

Psych: How’re you feeling?

Shifts in his seat.

Psych: The malaria getting you down at all?

Uneasy. Anxiety rising as remembered horror crowds his mind.

He stands, eyes staring at something only he can see.

Psych: Are you aright?

His eyes are squeezed tightly closed, sweat pouring down his face.

Psych: Come and sit down. You’re safe here mate. Tell me what’s happening.

S. Small: No Dave! NO!

Psych: gently taking his arm. What’s happening to Dave?

S. Small: Their eyes meet. It’s our uniform!

He leans over, his head buried deep in his hands as the images spill outwards, splashing blood over the disinfected floor.

Psych: The Japs?

S. Small: He lifts his head. He’s crying and moaning as if injured! Can’t leave him there. He might be one of ours! Dave, stop! There’s more of them. Stop! They’re surrounding you. Dave!

He presses his hands over his ears, rocking violently.

Psych: There you go mate.

S. Small: Chopping Dave into pieces! Dave’s blood all over them. All over the grass. Stop them! Someone please stop them. Aahhhg! He drops, his foetal body shaking violently as it loses control, spewing vomit and faeces onto the floor.

Psych: You’re fit for active service right now sergeant. Come on, I’ll help you up and John will take you to the ward. You can rest there a bit.

S. Small: Standing, leaning heavily on the doctor’s arm. Dave! Come back! Come back!

The dining room was a gathering spot in the red brick house in Hope Street. Near the kitchen and where the piano was. A good place for peeling peas, pressing the pods until they popped, then running your thumb along the seam, dislodging the individual peas into a bowl, tasting as you went. And the beans were luscious, especially raw, but in those days we had to cut off the tops and tails, peel back the strings, slice them into little diagonal pieces and straight into the boiling pot where they were transformed into slush. The pumpkin was always cut up in the kitchen and the potatoes were scoured under the tap that my mother ran at a dribble, scraping the knife across each one with short percussive sounds until the whiteness appeared.

Sitting and playing the piano was a comfortable place to be, looking out onto the side path that led from the front to the back of the house, bordered by the grey slats of the paling fence that separated us from the Kelly’s place.

A dining table, six matching chairs and a sideboard completed the room. The wood was dark with hand made lace doilies and embroidered runners. Small ornaments adorned the top of it together with my mother’s porcelain cups and saucers. The drawers of the sideboard were lined with maroon felt that contrasted beautifully with the shiny silver fish knives and forks and the pearl coloured handles of the cutlery set that was kept for ‘good’. In the next drawer she kept her decks of cards. She loved playing bridge. Sometimes the Cox family came for a card game and dinner. That was in the early days when we first moved there, when I was four. We removed all the junk from the traymobile, took all the music off the top of the piano and what wouldn’t fit got shoved under our beds until they’d gone. After a couple of years they stopped coming. In fact people rarely visited. Too much to be kept silent and hidden. My mother made the place mats out of thick cardboard and pictures of natural scenes that she cut out of magazines, protected forever by coats of clear lacquer. We liked them.

Matt, my brother always got in first and did the washing up, leaving me with the smelly tea towels. The pressure cooker lived on the stove, the benches always full of stuff with bits of recipes torn off flour packets, empty glass jars, the toaster, the jug, and the ceramic jars of ginger that had been given to my father by the Chinamen at the fish markets. You had to throw the saucepans and lids into the cupboard and quickly shut the door. Of course they all fell out every time you opened it again, so eventually they all lived around the kitchen too. The waffle iron made us treats. We spread them, piping hot with honey and a blob of homemade ice cream that would melt deliciously into the squares. When the honey ran out we used treacle or golden syrup. Sometimes we were treated to a tin of condensed milk so we mashed up a whole heap of bananas and smothered them in this gooey sweet syrup and piled them on top of the waffle. Nothing ever tasted so good.

I was scared of the pressure cooker. It exploded all over the kitchen at regular intervals, spreading stewed meat and veggies down the walls and over the ceiling. When the kitchen table fell apart the traymobile was moved in to replace it. The kitchen was on the southern side of the house and was quite dark, looking out onto a large privet hedge that made us sneeze every spring.

Sometimes, Saturday mornings felt good. The insanity seemed to momentarily abate and it was a time for order. We cleaned the house, the hair brushes and the animals and nothing seemed to go wrong. This was the armistice. The only official moments from A to Z that were pre-ordained and therefore predictable. The sunshine gathered on the bristles of the hair brushes as they rested on the window box and my mother switched into the safety of the normality of a group of people going about the chores of everyday life. Dad went to golf.

Bed by bed we changed the linen, folding the sheets into hospital corners and smoothing out the rippling bedspreads. The rugs were taken out onto the back porch and shaken, the bath scrubbed until the light green porcelain glowed. Although this was a cleaning occurrence its thoroughness was complete when my Grandmother came to stay, sometimes for an unwarranted period. She was my father’s mother, a tall, rather elegant woman with a pointed chin and a large nose that was always being poked into our business.

At any time the use of hot water was strictly patrolled, the bath filled with lukewarm fluid to a height of about six centimetres. But when our Grandmother was there the tide went out even further. Small nude bodies shivered as she knelt on the rubber mat beside the bath, making sure that every bit was cleaned, each ear receiving her long wriggling finger disguised in a yellow washer.

Banana trees overhung the back verandah and in summer were laden with fruit wrapped in plastic bags to stop the possums from eating it. I look a little to the left and I can see the garage, its roof and one wall covered in ivy. The orange tree hangs with juicy balls and the lemons shine in the summer sun.

I can feel the red painted concrete of the back patio under my feet and hear the sound of the fly screen door as it bangs shut and Prince comes to join me, his stubby tail wagging and his brown eyes looking straight into my soul. I scoop him up and run down the driveway to where Dad is working in the front garden. The fragrance of the frangipani is wonderful and I think of the nights when it blends with the magic of the moonlight and takes me away.

You want to go collect oysters?

I nod, grab my shoes from the front porch and we’re off. Prince, my father and me. Dad’s good at oyster collecting, opening each tightly closed shell with his fishing knife, one for me, one for him. Prince doesn’t like oysters.

The house in Hope Street is changed now. Renovated. The garage is still there, the old jacarandas lining the back paling fence and the two frangipani trees still flowering in the front garden.

The silence in the garage was reassuring, a space of temporary existence. To breathe in the memory of hope and to gently allow the thinness of its energy to spread through her body. He was gone, at least out of the garage. She stood up and adjusted her clothing to her body and her brain into being. Gradually she felt the terror subsiding as her eyes picked out the familiarity of her surroundings and her heart leapt as she watched the moonlight casting its beacon on the rusting garden tools. The green of the ivy-drenched walls soaked pleasantly through her skin and life became visible once more.

She had heard the wooden door of the garage heaving and the metal scraping of the lock as it dragged across the concrete. The madness of her father had moved, his fury spent and he had gone and left her alone. But she waited, still and silent until she heard the familiar sound, the distinct combination of the wood and mesh of the fly screen door hitting the wooden frame. He was inside the house and she was safe.

With the movement of a shadow she went towards the shaft of light, leaning on the door as she moved it carefully open. Slowly. Slowly. She crept to its edge like a furtive mouse looking into the outside air. The smell delighted her, her body tingled and the brightness of the stars melted into her. She stepped out.

The air suddenly filled with an horrendous battle cry as the monster came lumbering towards her, the meat cleaver raised high above his head.

She ran across the lawn, landing in the ferns at the back of the garden, crouching, hidden in the blackness beside the paling fence. She watched, her heart leaping as he hurled the cleaver, missing the lemon tree and thundering into the tap, the sound of the metal ringing through the silence of the night air and into her brain. Closer and closer he came, his thick screech of battle building panic on panic.

He was too near. She ran in circles around the lawn, her mind pleading to the moonlight to show her a place to hide but her father stayed close behind her, slicing the air with the cleaver.

So she just ran, smaller and more agile than he, an image picture of her severed body pushing her forward until she leapt, arms first behind the jacaranda tree in the middle of the back fence, remaining still and silent. Her body was moaning. A deep sound that seemed to come from her bowels, vibrating through her body and gurgling through her throat. But she was no longer there. Someone else had been thrust out front to deal with the situation. To her child’s mind, no matter what happened even if the body was chopped up, she would now survive, watching safely from above.

He had heard her, moving nearer, but her wits propelled her forwards, across the heap of rubbish to the christmas bush. She grabbed its trunk, as the whooshing sound scraped by her ear. Again she left, leaving the small child, Beatrice, curled up in tight ball in the black soil.

The weapon had lodged in the trunk of the bush and as he struggled to retrieve it yet another part sprang into action, running across the lawn, brushing through the mint and parsley and finally climbing over the paling fence and into Kelly’s yard.

She pressed her body tightly up against the splintery wood, her heart racing but safe.

Silently she began to creep towards the street. Then she remembered.

Prince! She ran, leaping the wire fence up the side path, opening the gate. His insanity remained as he staggered around the yard, slicing at anything that moved. She didn’t care. Prince was her life. She called again, the hysterical sounds splitting the darkness. She called. Again. Again. He came, eyes questioning, body trembling as she picked him up and ran, without looking back, to the soft green leaves of the willow tree as it stood gently in the safety of the moonlight by the creek.

As an adult I met a wonderful man and we married. My system had done an excellent job and I then remembered nothing of my childhood trauma, but after the birth of my two children memories began to push their way to the surface and anxiety took over my life until the terror became a living breathing entity with a life force of its own. It lived in every cell of my being, causing me to dissociate and to be immediately back in the events of my childhood. Back in the house in Hope Street, ready to be dead.

The cupboard, small and painted white was built to store the wood for the open fire but is now almost empty. It starts inside in the corner of the lounge room with the green bubbly lounge and the grey carpet dotted with borders of small pink rosebuds and continues through the double brick wall to the night-time air and glorious stars.

A silent shadow moves carefully towards this corner, suddenly stopping to curl up into a tight ball that even the moon can’t see as the roar of violence echoes through the rendered walls and into her belly. Then further, closer, to hide in the spider infested cupboard. She slides in, slowly closing the inside door behind her but she doesn’t all fit, her legs spilling out and resting on the red painted concrete of the back patio. Prince is near her, his tail wagging and as she reaches out to pat him the moon casts a momentary smile and her song returns.

She is filled