Juliana and Rose

Juliana was a year under me at school and lived two doors down from me. Under that the low tin roof and rickety, single fronted terrace verandah in a terrace of two single storey weatherboard dwellings lived Juliana, two older brothers and a mum and Dad. The Dad was a sales rep for a soft drink company.

The house, entered by the front door, was quiet, dark and sagging. Dark red carpet along the hall sunk with the creaking floorboards. We always had to be quiet going along that hall, as if someone was asleep in the front bedroom. We tiptoed along to the heavily shrouded lounge then into a kitchen at the back where windows let in a little light. I never met her parents, except maybe seeing her father as a looming dark figure in the house as if by accident.

Juliana and I played at my house by throwing a ball up against the wooden wall on the verandah outside my bedroom which opened onto that verandah as well as onto the hallway inside.

We would bounce the ball against the wall and think up colours for our wedding dress. My favourite was apricot. We'd go through names of fruit, flowers, depending on how many we could do before dropping the ball.

We'd play hockey on the near turfless dirt of our backyard using sticks and any ball we could find. Our brothers plus local boys also played. We had a chook run on the left at the back corner and side fence and a gate at the back fence opening onto a vacant block leading to a busy road. My elder brother fell off the roof of the chookhouse once and broke his collarbone.

We ran out onto that road beyond the vacant block to chase a ball and Mum was very upset with us incase we were killed. I just couldn't imagine a car being that heavy. A garage was to the right at the back of the house past the rotary clothes line where we had made a string and tied there with paper on the end for a cat to chase, round and round as we ran, pushing the line fast until the cat fitted.

Dad loved to fix his car and tinker with just about everything. He was a 'jack of all trades' but master of none. He worked shift work at the steel works.

I was often bored at home. Sometimes when I asked Mum to give me something to do she would tell me to cut newspaper into squares then thread them with string and hang them in the toilet which was along the L-shaped back verandah in the other direction from my bedroom. She was never big on housework so never told me or showed me how to do that. Sometimes we were made to do the dishes, but usually as a punishment. Cutting up newspaper for the toilet soon lost its appeal because nobody ever used it. The toilet paper didn't run out. It was a futile and useless job. Once when I was doing that job, Juliana brought some boys, one was her brother and they wanted, in no uncertain terms, to go into our outside toilet with me and her and touch our private parts with theirs. I found this thought terrifying and only remember the fear not anything about what actually happened.

Another time Juliana and I were bored so we went into my room from the verandah door. My room had a carpet of clothes strewn over the floor, a double bunk where I slept on the bottom and nobody had the top, an open bureau for storing clothes where a cat had given birth to a litter once and they werent discovered until the kittens were cute and fluffy with their eyes open and exploring. One wall had been strung with my recent birthday cards. We started a game where Juliana had to close her eyes and feel along the wall to guess what she was touching. We had to be quiet because my Dad was on night shift and asleep in the next room.

Juliana was feeling along the row of cards when a huge huntsman tree spider darted from behind a card and stopped a little way up the wall. Juliana opened her eyes and screamed loudly.

My Dad was out of his room and into mine. He grabbed my shoulder and whacked furiously into my upper legs and buttocks with his hand. I started to cry. After about six stinging whacks he disappeared again. We may have retreated outside after that. The worst part of the incident from my point of view was Juliana witnessing the whole episode, along with the feeling of unfairness.

Once I remember standing in my Dad's and Mum's darkened bedroom beside the bed. He was standing in front of me saying 'go on, touch it'. His 'tossy', as a penis was called in our household, was about chest height to me. I kind of remember the feeling of warm skin moving over a firm 'tossy'. But don't remember anything else about the incident.

The thought of the word 'tossy' has always caused alarming feelings of retreat and revulsion in my mind.

Juliana and I would buy boiled sweets at a local shop if we had money and we always fought over what to buy. We collected tadpoles from small ponds on the side of a hill not that far away. We'd put them in a bucket at my place and fight over who would get the biggest.

After we moved to Melbourne when I was about eleven I lost touch with Juliana. But much later, on a visit back I heard that she had been gangraped in one of the caves at the beach.

Lumps of coal wash up on that beach. A mammoth, pacific surf rolls onto the apricot coloured sand and crashes over the ocean baths where I learned to swim. The baths were nestled next to a headland that could be navigated by climbing over rough boulders at its base. Bits of sand, more boulders more sand and caves to crawl into under the rockface. Modest houses with magnificent views dot the top of the headland. Winding roads with expensive housing offer panoramic views over Newcastle from up on its shoulder.

We lived on the flat. The houses were small and roads trimmed with coblestones at the gutters, from the 'old days'. A metal 'silent policeman' or 'fried egg' as we called them squatted in the middle of each intersection of the streets we crossed to get to the beach. Dad taught us to swim by throwing us in then holding us under the belly when he was waist deep in water and telling us to kick and move our arms.

Rose lived closer to the beach than us. She was the same year as me only in the 'B' class. I didn't give her much respect for that. Even though she invited me to play with her at school with her friends when I was walking across the fields alone, I always declined.

I was always late for school. "I couldn't find my shoe" was one excuse I used. Then Rose started to come by my house to pick me up. She would clean my shoes and try to hurry me along. I would sometimes walk home with her to her house. She had large cages of finches in the backyard. Her Mum had no teeth. There was a stepdad with the nickname Golli. Rose had her periods at ten years old. She showed me what the tail end of one looked like - just a brown smear on a pad. I was just a stick child compared to her.

My mother joined me up to a gym, she was so worried about me being so small and skinny. Twice a week after school I caught the bus into town. Sometimes Rose came with me. Once, a cousin did. I was supposed to do exercises. The attendants sometimes coached me but soon left me alone, especially if I had wet my pants and didn't have clean clothes. My clothes were never clean and I was unwashed. I ended up going on the bikes for a bit then sitting in the steam room, then didn't want to go at all.

Rose had boobs, frizzy, brown hair and an eye with a slight cast. Her family moved house closer to the beach. Many years later I ran into her as she served my fish and chips in downtown Newcastle. She had a daughter from a relationship that hadn't worked out, but was now happily involved and living with a woman. She told me she had been raped by the boy next door

at the time we had been children together, and also her stepdad Golli had interfered with her and so the Mum had kicked him out.

Rose still lives in Merewether, far as I know.