Chapter 2: She Arrives

I called Gordon first, who promised he’d be here in less than thirty minutes. Then, I called Dad, who was at work. “Absolutely not!” Dad denied when I said I’d told her to come over.

“You’re prepared to let someone beat up and whore out your ex-wife, my mother, Dad?” I asked. “Surely, you’re a better person than that?”

Dad sighed before mumbling that I was probably right; we had to do something. He promised to be home as quickly as possible. He was packing up and leaving now.

I was glad that Gordon got there first. He squeezed me fiercely and told me it would be okay, that he had my back and would support any path I took. While we were waiting, I phoned uni and excused myself from classes, citing a family emergency. It turned out I needn’t have bothered unless I’d be gone for a week or more.

Mum got out of a cab about twenty minutes later. I was shocked and appalled by her appearance. Mum’s once luscious figure, which was so similar to mine, was skinny to the point of emaciation. Her golden-blonde hair was lank and streaked with grey, and her eyes were dull and lifeless. In short, she was Dad a year ago. I feared she was on drugs. Fortunately, she later assured me she wasn’t, but that Sam, the man she’d abandoned us for, threatened that if she didn’t hand over her pay, he would forcibly inject her with heroine to addict her so she’d be his whore.

I had to pay the driver because Mum didn’t have any money.

Dad arrived in his Mercedes while Mum, Gordon, and I stared at each other on the front lawn. Mum gasped when Jacqui got out of the car instead of Jack, and she began crying. Dad looked at her angrily before getting back in his car and parking it in the garage. He waited until we came inside before speaking.

“What the fuck do you want, Mandy?” He snarlingly asked. “Why have you crawled out of the woodwork? Looking for money again? Fuck off, you two-dollar whore. We don’t want you here.”

Unlike she’d ever done before, Mum just stood and accepted his abuse. I wondered why, but then I saw how she kept her head tilted and her hair hanging over one side of her face. I gripped her chin, straightened her head, and swept the hair off her face. Her left eye had a shiner that Mike Tyson would have been proud to have given. Her cheekbone on that side was similarly bruised, and now that I was close, I could see she’d covered her skinny upper arms with foundation makeup to hide the bruises on them.

She smelled, and her dress was dirty. I thought it was a suede colour, but I could see it was a dirty white. Mum’s armpits and legs were unshaved, also unlike her. Mum’s shoes were filthy and held together with duct tape.

“I ran away three weeks ago,” she explained. “Sam brought a man home from the pub who had paid him fifty bucks to fuck me. I wouldn’t do it, so Sam beat me. I got a black eye and bruises and fucked by Sam’s friend anyway. Sam took the fifty dollars and bought a bottle of scotch. I packed what I could and ran when he passed out. I’ve been living on the streets since then. I was raped again the first night I was on the street.

“Last night, I was walking down the street, looking for somewhere safe to sleep, when a guy pulled up in his car and offered me fifty bucks to blow him. When he pulled out his wallet to pay me, I grabbed it, stole his cash, and ran away. There was enough to buy a plane ticket to Brisbane, and here I am.”

There were holes in her story, such as the fact that she was way too emaciated to have been on the streets for only three weeks. However, the fact that she was so thin and dirty indicated that something had gone wrong.

“Gordon is a doctor,” I said to her evenly. “Will you allow him to examine you and see if you need any medical help?”

Mum looked at him doubtfully but readily agreed to allow him to check her out. I asked if I could be with her, which seemed to help her relax. I guess, if she’d been raped recently, it would make her feel better if she wasn’t alone with a man she didn’t know.

I took Mum up to one of the spare rooms as Gordon retrieved his medical bag from his car. Gordon, if he wasn’t sleeping with me or Dad, uses the guest room, and I wasn’t kicking out someone who helped for someone who deserted, so I took her to the smallest of the spare rooms. Petty? Yeah, I know. Shrugs. She wasn’t forgiven.

When she disrobed, I was shocked again. The bruises on her face and upper arms weren’t the only ones. Her back and front looked like someone had used her for a punching bag. Her skin hung loosely as if she’d lost a lot of weight quickly, and her once high-standing, firm breasts sagged like deflated balloons down her chest. She was braless, and her knickers were torn. I could see dried blood stains on her panty’s gusset and I realised at least one part of her tale was true—she’d been raped at least once.

Gordon examined her from top to toe, took some blood to be tested, and sent her to wee in a specimen bottle. Mum winced several times as Gordon poked and prodded her. When he’d completed his exam, he leaned against the door and said, “I don’t think there is any major damage, but I want to be sure, so I’ll get Carina or Jacqui to take you up to the PA (Princess Alexandra Hospital). I want X-rays of your ribs and back and an ultrasound of your spleen, kidneys, and liver.”

He handed Mum a slip of paper. “This is a referral, which will hopefully get you seen sooner than normal, but I wouldn’t count on it. I’d have to return to my surgery to write X-ray and ultrasound requests because I don’t have those forms with me.”

Mum looked at me. I shrugged noncommittedly and asked Gordon, “Is it okay if she showers and changes first?”

“Of course,” Gordon agreed. “I’ll drop these samples at Sullivan Nicolaides and meet you back here. I’ll take your dad with me to ensure he’s not alone. I can tell he’s angry, worried, and insecure, so rather than leave him at home, I’ll take him out.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said.

Gordon left, and Mum held her dress to her scrawny body and scurried across the hall to the bathroom. I told her to come to my room when she was done. I went down to the kitchen and found that Gordon was waiting for me.

“Someone, I’d guess more than one, has done a real number on your mother, Carina,” he told me gravely. “Most of her face, body, arms and legs are covered in bruises. She has vaginal and anal bleeding. Some of the bruises are old and faded, so I’d guess she’s been receiving regular beatings for at least the last two months, probably more. The perpetrator(s) was smart, though. Other than her upper arms, which would have been covered with long sleeves, none of the bruises are where they’d be seen if she was dressed.”

My temper boiled. I hated what my mother did to me and my father, but no one deserves to be treated like that. “Your best guess?”

“Sam’s been whoring her out for several months. I doubt her johns will have used condoms, so there’s a strong risk she has VD or worse: Herpes, Hepatitis C, maybe even HIV.

“Any signs of drug or alcohol use?”

“Not excessively, no,” Gordon reassured me. “Her teeth are too good for her to be on crack, and she doesn’t have any puncture marks I could see. Her eyes are dull, but her corneas are bright, so I think her liver function is still unimpeded.”

Gordon took Dad’s hand, and they left. I heard the bathroom door open, so I returned to my room. I gave Mum a pair of my panties and a bra. The panties barely stayed on her ass, and the bra was so big as to be comical if the situation wasn’t so dire, she removed it. Even my smallest dress, one that had hung unnoticed from when I was sixteen and not so developed, hung from her scrawny frame, but at least it was fresh and clean. My sneakers fit okay, so she wore those, too.

As Gordon had warned, we waited almost two hours before someone could see Mum. They performed the same examination Gordon had and came to the same conclusions. More blood was taken, even though I said that Gordon already had some taken and it was at the pathology being tested. An orderly took Mum away for X-rays and an ultrasound. He returned her about thirty minutes later, and we waited another thirty before a resident came in. He put the X-rays under the light and examined them carefully.

“Nothing broken, Mrs Morshuis,” he said cheerfully. He took out the ultrasound results and perused them. “Have you been weeing blood, Mrs Morshuis?” He asked. Mum shook her head. “I think your liver and right kidney are bruised but not seriously enough to be concerned about. Keep a close eye on your urine for the next few days, and if there’s any blood, get yourself back here immediately.”

Just then, one of his students came in with the blood results. The resident examined them and said, “You have an STI (Sexually Transmitted Infection). Luckily, it’s the common venereal disease, also called ‘the clap’. It smells a bit icky, probably stings or itches a bit, but it’s nothing too serious. A simple course of antibiotics should clear it up.”

He continued, “You have lesions in your vagina and anus, which I’ll prescribe a topical cream for, but that’s more for comfort than anything else. Even without the cream, they’ll clear up in a few days as long as you avoid using them for sex for that long.”