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NoAgenda:You know i’ll be watching.
The flash of red and blue catches my eye; a police cruiser pulls out of a gate down a side street and rockets off towards the city. I pause on the corner, Gabriel’s chat still open in my phone.
I believe you, he’d said this morning.
It’s been two years and my father still thinks he can control my life. He still thinks he has power.
He still thinks he can threaten me. Threaten people I love.
No more.
The police station is quiet when I walk in. There’s a woman behind the main desk, and she looks up at me as I step through the large front doors.
‘Can I help you?’ she asks.
There’s a thick plastic screen between me and the officer, no doubt a necessity of the job. ‘I want to report an incident of stalking. And harassment. And violence.’ I pause. ‘It’s complicated.’
She pushes a clipboard through the little gap in the screen. ‘It often is. Fill that out. I’ll have an officer come to take a statement.’
I take the clipboard and sit down on the old vinyl chairs that line the foyer. Fluorescent lights flicker above me. The pen doesn’t work right away so I scribble on the side of the page until the ink flows.
When I’m done, I hand the clipboard back to the officer behind the screen and sit down again to wait. Five minutes later, another officer calls me and I follow him down a long corridor and into what looks like an interrogation room. My hands start sweating as I sit down at the table and face the officer. He has a crop of reddish brown hair, and his moustache is tinged with ginger. It twitches as he reads through my paperwork.
‘You’ve got a stalker,’ he says, and makes a show of turning on the recording app on his phone. ‘Start from the beginning; what do you know about them?’
I place my hands on the table to stop them shaking. A part of me still doesn’t believe I’m doing this.
‘He’s my father.’
19
Noah
Finding out there’s a warrant for my father’s arrest was not what I expected from the whole AVO process. The officer couldn’t provide any detail about the arrest warrant—what it was for, or when it was served—nor could he give me any information about my mum. She isn’t in the system.
Back to square one.
My mother told me my father had always drunk a lot. When they were in school, it was a social thing. He’d drink to excess with his mates, and everyone would have a laugh. When he became a police officer, he’d drink with the other recruits after a hard shift—or any shift.
There’s not a lot of crime in Bendigo, so sometimes Dad would be asked to transfer to the city station for holiday or sick leave placements. According to Mum, that’s when it got bad.
By the time I realised what was going on, my dad had taken a leave of absence from the police department for drink-driving. Caught going one-twenty in an eighty zone, he was two times over the limit when he was pulled over by a colleague. He never went back to the force after that. Don’t think he could face it.
Growing up, Mum worked as a nurse at the local hospital. After school if she had a shift, I’d walk to the hospital and sit in the waiting room until she was done. Looking back, some of the nurses must have known what was happening; they knew why it wasn’t safe for me to go home.
I was eight the first time he threw a glass bottle at me. I remember the sound it made as it shattered on the wall, and the pain when I stepped on a shard the following day.
People always say, ‘Why didn’t she just leave?’ like it’s so easy. Dad was an ex-cop. He’d have tracked us down. He had networks all over the country. All it’d take was a report that we were missing and a few calls, and he’d have his mates out looking for us. They’d have dragged us back home.
At least, that was what he told us.
Suspended in half-sleep, I hear the door lock and blearily realise Margie must be leaving for work, and that it’s probably close to 8 am. Fumbling for my phone, I turn on the screen. A big red reminder screams: 10 AM UNIVERSITY OPEN DAY.
Shit. Isodo not feel up to tackling that today. I force myself to get up and drag my lethargic body into the bathroom to take a long piss.
After spilling my guts to the police officer, it felt like someone had let a plug out of a bathtub and everything I’d been holding in for the past two years was sucked down the drain. I’d felt empty. I’d felt confused.
I had thought making an official complaint and applying for an AVO would make me feel vindicated. I thought it would feel like taking control of my life. But all it did was make me feel fragile, vulnerable. Condensed together in a single statement, the sum of my entire fucked-up childhood was sobering and sad. I’d cried walking home, grappling with the emotions that had risen to the surface.
