Chapter 6

The next morning, Kat and I started swimming our laps at 7am, as we usually do. When we finished, Sal was waiting for us with Michael and Jael, wanting to talk. Kat said, “Hang on, coffee first. We can talk in the kitchen.”

Once Kat had her coffee in her hand, Sal said “You said yesterday that we should be open and honest in this home, right?”

Kat nodded, knowing what was coming. “Yes, absolutely. There’s nothing to hide in this house.”

“Then, what happened to you after we went to bed last night? I thought I had escaped from an abusive marriage. We’re really concerned about what we heard.”

Kat smiled at Sal. “Yes, I’m sure it sounded awful, and we knew we would need to talk to you about this morning. I’m really glad you asked us about it directly.”

“There’s two parts to the explanation. The first part is that Jim and Edna were so upset about my hair cut that they told Dave he should punish me. Dave decided it was time for me to get a spanking, so I would know that I should talk to him about something like that before. And I probably should have, really.”

“Spanking? That’s not at all an appropriate reaction.”

“No, well, it wouldn’t be, except for the second part of the explanation. What did you hear? You heard him smacking me, right? And then what did you hear?”

I saw the penny drop for Sal. But not for Jael and Michael.

“It’s a game we play occasionally. Dave smacks me as loudly as he can, but he never hurts me. It makes me crazy hot and then we have wild sex. I loved it. We’re sorry we were so noisy; we generally prefer not to be, but we just got carried away last night. Jael and Michael, I can see you don’t understand - it’s something that some people enjoy, something you’ll understand when you’re older, even if you don’t want it. But – and this is important! - you only do it when you’re deep into a relationship, and you truly trust each other, and you can totally let go and still be safe.”

“And it’s really appropriate that you were concerned, because your experience is from a relationship where those conditions weren’t met, and it would be really unsafe to do anything like that. And that made it wrong for us to let you hear it right now. Sorry.”

Jael asked, “So he punished you with something you actually enjoy?”

“Well, no, he spanked me to get my attention, not as a punishment, because I love it, when it’s done right. Here – check my butt!”. She turned around to show them. Not a mark on it – still perfect, as always. “See – he didn’t hurt me at all. Then he politely asked me to talk to him first next time, and I promised I would.”

Sal asked, “How often do you get spanked?”

Kat looked at me. When did I last spank her? “I think it’s more than a year since last time. Maybe about once a year?”

Kat nodded. “Yeah, about that. It’s not a good thing to do too often.”

Sal sighed. “I think you’re super lucky. I could only wish that I had a relationship like that.”

I could see that shocked Jael and Michael. As did a voice that floated down the corridor, from Michelle. “Hey Mum, do you reckon it’s too late for me to get a haircut like that today?” That was followed by laughter from at least Tim and Toni.

More laughter when I responded, “Just who do you want to spank you?”

A couple of days later, Premier Dan Andrews finally announced the lock down. And it was a big one. Parts of it caught me by surprise, and they were certainly going to be challenging. The biggest two impacts, the ones that would hurt, and hurt for many weeks, were sealing the greater city of Melbourne – including us – off from the country (the “Ring of Steel”) and restricting us to within 5km from our home. Though, of course, there were other rules that we had to deal with: only one person could leave the home each day for shopping, and the only reasons to leave home were essential shopping, exercise in our local area, and providing care to family. And a 9pm curfew, though we couldn’t see how that was relevant to us. We had until midnight to be ready for all this.

Fortunately, we were mostly ready as a family, because my immediate focus was trying to understand the impact of the lockdown on my business. The rules were complicated and layered, and I doubted anyone would really know for days, even though they were effective almost immediately. The problem was that we were trying to lock Victoria down, while keeping the rest of Australia open. The rules, as they were, penalised Victorians more in order to support the other states. I didn’t mind personally – seemed like a good Christian approach to me, but I suspected that most people would be pretty unhappy about it, if they ever figured it out. But they probably wouldn’t because they were just so complex, with so many exceptions to the exceptions.

Could my staff still visit hospitals? Yes. Could we meet outside hospitals? Not really (not that we had much need for that). Could Eleni, my admin person, still make her weekly visit to our home in order to run my business? I had no idea. Were all my staff going to be OK? I didn’t know that either. I had already given the entire staff a day off this week – one our customers could ill afford – to get themselves ready for lock down (I’d lost more than a day myself, what with Tim, Sal, Jael and Michael moving in). But with these new surprise rules, were they OK? I chatted quickly with all of them, and some were ok, and others didn’t actually know. I made sure that they knew I had their back, and that they could talk to Kat if they needed to.

I called a quick family meeting - all the adults were home – so we could check that we were ok. So far as we knew, we were. We were pretty much locked down and good to go once the kids got home from school; from the end of today, they’d be going back to remote learning. Which would mean also that Jael and Michael could go back to their school as if everything was normal.

Sal was actually relieved about the 5km rule. It put her own home far out of range. And also, it put her far out of range from Lem, who’d been calling and sending a variety of messages to try and get Sal home. Good thing Kat had Sal’s phone, so she hadn’t seen any of them, but she knew they were coming. Kat had gotten Sal to login to it once, and sent Lem a polite message “from a friend” saying that Sal and the kids were safe, seeing out lockdown in a secret location, the phone was going to be off, and advising him to use lockdown to reset his life. Lem had no idea where Sal was, but surely it wouldn’t take him long to realise that she might be with us.

Michelle was hung up about the ring of steel. She was enormously relieved that Tim hadn’t gone to his parents – if he had, they probably would have been separated for months. They were both very appreciative that Tim was with us.

So we thought that we were ready. Mentally, I drew a deep breath, and said to myself, “Hopefully, that’s the end of the crazy stuff”.

Dinner that night, all we could talk about was the impact of the lock down and us and our friends. There was this real feeling of preparing for a storm. Well, actually, a bush fire. Given that we live in Australia, and have bush all around our home, we have a summer bush fire safety plan ready to go. Our main plan is not to get caught at home if there is a bush fire, but if one starts between our home and the end of our street, we’re trapped. In that case, our safe zone is the wet area – there’s huge fire blankets that we can lower all around the wet zone to cover the glass and keep the radiant heat out, and there’s basically nothing flammable; it’s mostly concrete, steel and glass. Preparing for lock down really felt like sheltering in our wet area.

So, ready? Yes.

Well, we thought so, but after dinner, Zach told me he needed to speak to both of us about Zara, his girlfriend.

About Zara. Zach met Zara through some sport at school, and they’d been friends since the year before, lots of IMing during the first lock down, and then they’d started dating – so for a couple of months, really. She was fit and good looking, and quite outgoing. She’d been to our place a couple of times to visit, but both had been clothed visits. There were two reasons for that – Zach felt that being naked would have pushed them into bed before he was ready for that, and also Toni knew her and didn’t think she was right for Zach. In fact, Toni thought that she was “entittled”, which is what her and Michelle call girls who think they can get away with acting like Karens because they have big tits. Given that, we wanted to get to know her before we initiated her.

Kat and I were inclined to agree with Toni, though we didn’t really know her well enough yet to be sure. For both Kat and I, Zara was a bit much about looks, and not enough about substance. Looks are fine – nothing wrong with that, but we believe that it’s the choices you make that matter. Kat felt, based on her vibe, that Zara wasn’t going to make the hard choices around honesty; instead, she’d manipulate people around her. But really, we had little to go on, so we hadn’t done much other than talk to Zach about some of these issues.

In spite of our general opinion, Zach and Zara had gone ahead and had sex a couple of weeks before this – their first time for both of them. Per the rules, Zach had talked to both of us about this. At length, actually. Hormones said yes, Zara said yes, but his brain said, it’s too early. His heart ... wasn’t sure. Our own desire was that no way he should have sex with her, but our advice was more restrained, and leaned towards that he should wait until he knew her better. What actually happened in the end was that their hormones made the decision, and they went ahead and had sex. Were we happy with this? We could live with it. We had judged that it was likely their relationship would be over soon enough, and Zach had thought through the issues enough so that he’d learn from the experience.

Per the lock down rules, people were locked down in their homes, with no visitors, with a special exemption for lovers, who could still visit each other, though we weren’t sure whether that was limited to 5km. Also, we couldn’t tell from the rules what the situation was with lovers younger than 18. Were they even allowed to visit? They couldn’t drive themselves, so how was that supposed to work? I don’t think the government had even thought about at this point, with so much else on their plate. The kid’s IM networks were running hot with debate and speculation about this.

Given this, I expected that Zach would want to clarify the rules around visiting with Zara, particularly since Zara’s home was a little further than 5km. But his opening was a bombshell:

“Zara’s been kicked out her home.”

“Umm, why?”

“Her parents found out that we had sex when she talked them about me visiting during lockdown, and then they lost their mind, and kicked her out.”

I didn’t know what to say. I could imagine a parent being unhappy, even mad, that their 16-year-old daughter had sex with her boyfriend without consulting them, but to throw her out of the house? Especially this night of all nights? That was bizarre. Not even the strictest religious nuts in my extended family would consider that.

Kat said, “That doesn’t make sense at all. Why would they kick her out of the house?”

“Well, her parents are cruel. They specifically told her they didn’t want her to sleep with me, and so now that she’s done what they told her not to, they’ve disowned her.”

Man, there was red flags all over that sentence. Starting with a very obvious issue, but Kat beat me to it.

“Hang on, when we were talking about you and her having sex, you said that she’d spoken to her parents about it, and they were fine with it.”

“Yes, that’s what she told me. But she lied about that.”

“If you’d known that, would you have done things differently?”

“Absolutely. We would never have had sex at all.”

This is exactly the kind of mess that our rules aim to prevent, but of course, there’s no guarantee.

“And she’s still your girlfriend?”

“Yeah, I guess” but there was - naturally - some uncertainty there. I decided to get us back to the issue at hand.

“So, where is she now then?”

“She’s at a friend’s place around the corner from her home.”

“Can she stay there?”

“No, they say she has to sort it out with her parents tonight and go home. But that won’t happen. She doesn’t know what to do – she’s really desperate.”

“She has other family?”

“Not that she knows. Both her parents don’t have any relationship with their families, and she’s never met them. So I was wondering...”

No prizes for guessing what came next. Kat and I had both seen it from about the first sentence.

“We took Tim, Sal, Jael and Michael in. Could we offer to take Zara in?”

Kat is pretty chill, and rarely loses her temper but I could see that she was about to. So, I held up my hand to her, and said to Zach, “How about you tell me all the reasons this is different. And why taking Zara in is a bad idea for us.”

His reply hit the high points – she had lied to Zach about the sex. She didn’t know anything about how we lived, and we didn’t think she could be trusted. They hadn’t shown a long-term trusting relationship. She was much younger than Tim, and couldn’t come to our house without parental permission, and what did that mean now?

“I know all those things are true, but where else can she go? How can I abandon her to the street? Because that’s what she’s just said she’ll have to do.”

He showed us his message stream with her. It was nothing surprising – she was desperate, Zach was doing a competent job of comforting and supporting her for a 16-year-old boy. Then she face-timed him. I gave the phone back to him and he answered it.

What followed was pretty much what you would expect from a 16yr old girl who’s been thrown out of home as lock down starts – lots of tears and dramatic fears of doom. Really, someone had to find a place for her, if she couldn’t sort it out with her parents. And when Kat tried to get Zach to ask a particular question, Zach just gave her the phone.

Kat asked her what her parents said exactly. What she said sure made it sound very final. Kat asked whether the problem was religious – no. The family never went to church or anything like that. So why? It really came down to the obedience/affiliation to family thing. Zara had betrayed family, and that was unforgivable. Did she know that this was a likely outcome? That lead to rather confused response that sort of conveyed that indeed, she did know the risk she was taking but thought she could just push through it.

It was Kat who suggested that she should try calling her father – Zara said he was the one that mattered – to reason on Zara’s behalf, to reason as an adult. It wasn’t a very long call, really, but it sure managed to get Kat’s back right up at Zara’s parents. Kat tried to remind him what it was like to be a teenager, and she also asked him what he hoped would happen to his eldest daughter, and similar questions. All we got in response was abuse for not controlling our son and letting him turn their daughter against them. When the call progressed to him abusing Kat personally, I took Kat’s phone from her, and told him that such language wasn’t appropriate for speaking to a lady, and hung up on him.

Kat called Zara back – a phone call this time; so much simpler than face time for now. Zara just said “Yeah, thought so, so what now?”

The only thing that the phone call achieved was to get Kat firmly onto Zara’s side. I watched that transition with concern. While it was completely unreasonable for Zara to be thrown out of her house, her own behaviour, her own choices had landed her in this place. Why would she be different if she came to live with us? I said as much to Kat.

“Yeah, you’re right. But she’s only sixteen. Do we really have any choice?”

“I don’t know. What we’re going to do is this: Kat, you’re going to call a family meeting, so we can all talk about it. Zach, you’re going to explain what’s happened, and see if you can convince all the rest of the family. But first, send Zara a message telling her to try some of her other friends from school.”

There was pretty much zero chance that would make any difference, but it would at least keep her busy and talking while we talked.

Zach explained what had happened to the rest of the family. When he finished his explanation, and proposed that Zara come to live with us, Michelle was first.

“So, she lied about the sex? Oh, Zach, that’s so not fair. How do you feel about that?” You could just feel the empathy coming from her.

“Yeah, not good.”

“Do you believe her that you were first?”

Zach nodded. “Yeah, I do think so. For the whole hog, anyway.”

Michelle frowned. “And in spite of all this, you still want her to come live with us? How much of this is just because you’re thinking with your lower brain?”

Zach shrugged. “I’d like to think it’s not really a factor. I shouldn’t be, I know. But how can I be sure when I’m a teenage boy? Would you be sure? What I do know is that I won’t really be able to look at my face in the mirror if I don’t do anything to help her.”

Michelle nodded. I couldn’t think of a better way for him to respond, really. I knew that he had won her over. And I could see that Kat was still on board. For her it was a matter of sides now.

I could see that Sal was stunned by all this exchange.

So now there was just Toni to convince or manage. And if that was worked out, then I was going to turn Zara over to the tender mercies of Kat. Heaven help her.

Kat turned to Toni. “Toni, you’re not a fan of Zara, are you? What do you think?”

Toni frowned. “Not really, though she’s not as bad as I thought. And some of my friends think I’m being too hard on her. But what else can she do? I don’t want to be known as the family that turned her away. Anyway, I think that Zach needs to fill the empty spot in his bed.”

Everyone laughed.

“OK,” I said. “Does anyone else have any issues? It’s really hard for you, because you haven’t met her, so I don’t know what you can say.”

Tim and Sal just shrugged. No one else had anything to say.

Kat said, “OK, it’ll be the same deal. If she accepts the rules, and she lives by them, then she’s welcome here. But it’s going to be super hard for her to do that. Zach, you have to be prepared that she’ll be out on her bum at any time if Dad and I decide so. That’ll upset you greatly, but you have to take it on the chin if it happens. OK?”

“Yes, Mum, I understand. I can certainly see why you’re not sure about her. I’ll do what I can to help, but if you decide she has to go, then I’ll accept that and support you.”

Sigh. Such a different discussion from when we talked about Tim moving in. So much had changed in just a few days. But I already know that Zara won’t be family in the same way that Tim will be.

We picked up Zara from her friend’s house and took her to the nearest McDonalds, and sat in the back corner. Kat did all the talking this time, once we managed to pull Zara off Zach.

“Ok, Zara, we’ve been looking at your options, and you don’t really have any good ones. So we’re considering letting you come and live with us during the lock down.”

Zara’s was totally surprised by that. It was obviously far beyond her expectations.

“Oh, wow that would be like super awesome. Would you really do that? I didn’t want to ask, because ... because I didn’t want to cause trouble between Zach and you guys.” Then her face fell. “Mum and Dad would never let me live at your place.”

“Well, normally they’d have to approve, yes. But they’ve already told us that they don’t care if you live on the street, so their opinion doesn’t really matter.”

Zara didn’t really know how to feel about that. A real slap in the face, but also, exactly what she wanted. She took a few deep breaths.

“Can we see if we can get my stuff from home before we go to your place?”

“Woah,” Kat said. “Slow down. I said we were considering it. There’s some things you need to agree to before we decide that it’s OK.”

“OK, sure, what? You don’t want us to have sex? OK.”

Sincerity factor zero, really, so far as I could see.

Kat looked at her. “Did Zach tell you that he talked to us before he had sex with you?”

“Umm, yes, he did. Did he really do that?” Her face showed how weird she thought that idea was.

“Yes,” Kat said, “he really did. Because our family works really very differently to others. If you’re going to come and live with us, you’re going to have act quite differently than you currently do. Tell me, did you tell Zach that your parents were OK with you and him having sex? And was it true?”

“Yes, I did say that. And no, it wasn’t true. But they’d never have said yes.”

“So, you just can’t do this at our home. At our home, you don’t deceive anyone, you tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And you control yourself, so that you don’t need to manipulate or trick people. And we work hard at living together. I can see that you’ve learnt really bad habits in your current family, and you can’t bring them to our home.”