Читать книгу The Styx - Patricia Holland - Страница 26

The shells have all gone. Usually there are gazillions of them patterned up and down and across the beach, but this morning, they’re all gone. Just a sparse spattering of the odd one here and there, but basically gone.

The Government made my mother cry. When she answered the phone, at first I thought something really bad had happened. But they were tears of gratitude, the deepest, deepest gratitude. My mother said it was unfortunate two local allied health workers—the two Ks—became casualties, but I don’t think she really meant it.

“I’m telling a big fib,” was written across my mother’s face in sparkly gold letters, and her lip service words slipped to the floor.

She had, I later read in her diary, naïvely written to our local state member, who also happened to be the new Minister for Education, and told him everything. She even sent a picture of me—a snatch of time without drool or hand slapping. The halo effect can be quite a powerful persuader. It didn’t occur to my mother that her letter would spark official enquiries across two departments. She didn’t know the OT and special-ed director would be sent copies of her letter (I wonder if they sent a copy of the photo too?). She didn’t know they would be publicly shamed and humiliated; both of them eventually dismissed, sacked.

Would she still have done it all, if she had? Yes, I think so. Definitely. I knew when she watched Miss Director Kourtney walk past her, ignoring her, after refusing to apply for even the communication board, it wasn’t the end of “the issue”. My mother was driven with the imperative to make sure I had an opportun­ity to be educated. She was a woman obsessed. “No” was not an option.

These allied health and education workers hold keys to the quag­mire of options available to injured and disabled people. They know how the system works. They write the recommendations for special equipment, assistance and all sorts of facilities, options and opportunities. This local crew carefully kept the big picture stuff to themselves and dealt out the options piecemeal, as it suited them.

Another of the catalysts for my mother’s letter was the other K, the OT, Kittie. K-Kittie rang my mother, telling her that there were visiting specialists to the city, Leichhardt, one and a half hours away, that I could take advantage of. It didn’t dawn on Mum at first that the visits were arranged to fit in with OT Kittie’s shopping needs—government vehicle, government fuel, government paying her a day’s wages. My mother said she had fleetingly thought that the connection between the suggested therapist appointments and my needs was at times tenuous, but she had still been naïve. She thought it was all about helping me.

The suggested visits weren’t weekly—maybe monthly. OT Kittie would meet Mum and me in Leichhardt at whichever clinic’s turn it was that time. She would briefly smile at us and pat Mum on the shoulder and me on the head—carefully avoiding any risk of spittle contamination. Then she would disappear, and reappear a few hours later with a car full of shopping. We’d get another pat and we’d see her again next clinic visit.

What was going on only dawned on Mum when she—we (I was there too)—overheard OT Kittie on the phone discussing picking up sheet music one of her friends had ordered.

“Don’t worry; if they’re not there this week, I’ll be back the week before Christmas,” OT Kittie said to her phone friend.

When she later happened to mention another specialist who coincidentally coincided with this same week, Mum twigged to the pattern. How did she feel? She didn’t realise anyone could be so tight with money to twiddle the system for free transport and a day’s wages. Hurt, disbelief, anguish that anyone would use—exploit—a little girl so cruelly disabled. So when the special-ed director refused to apply for communication equipment, my mother got doubly angry.

Mum included an outline of K-Kittie’s therapy visit practice in her letter to our local member—it’s probably still on the Department file—and kept a copy in her computer diary folder. Resulting action—suspension, inquiry, termination. Miss Director Kourtney met a similar fate, but in her case for continually failing to follow educational standard protocols. It included her dealings with other kids too, a number of them.

Director Kourtney actually resigned; she didn’t wait for the formal termination letter. She couldn’t handle being around the scrutiny of the ministerial investigation of her implementation of educational requirements. It was basically a case of too many fluffy toys, too little accountability.

You’d think educated people would accept they had erred. You’d think they’d be shamed, repentant, humiliated. But some people—probably the sort who’d exploit the disabled in the first place—simply hate. They store their hate and allow it to swell with a growing indignity of the injustice. The indignity of losing out to a frickin’ boong and retard. How dare they be treated so shabbily? How dare their status not be insulation?

Revenge brews, gurgles, waiting. And I guess OT Kittie didn’t have to wait too long for her revenge. Her husband Dominic is the crony solicitor who won my father’s custody hearing against my mother.