Chapter 78
ELSIE: “Three months after I entered the mental institution, I gave birth to a son. A lot of people worked hard to keep this out of the media. Imprisoning a child looked bad enough. But as hated as I was, it was a worse look to have a child give birth while imprisoned.
“I was taken to a hospital to deliver, and my labor was spent in a room with a warm but no-nonsense nurse called Maureen, who gave me ice chips and called me ‘pet.’ No one else was allowed in the room, but the nurse told me Ness was waiting downstairs, and I drew enormous strength from that.
“A doctor came in to deliver the baby, and though it took over an hour of pushing to get the baby out, he never addressed me directly once.
“I didn’t hold my son after he was born. I think I could have if I’d wanted to, but I didn’t see the point since I knew what was coming. Perhaps I should have? Still, I felt the little stabbing pains in my heart the moment I first heard him cry.
“Afterward, I listened to the chatter of the doctor and nurse as they checked him over, then a different nurse came into the room and took him away. I let my nurse hold me while I cried, and I nodded when she asked if I would like an ice cream. I was fifteen years old.
“After five years at the institution, I was released into the community. I studied to be a librarian and got a job at the State Library.”
LIBBY: “Did you ever see Ness again?”
“I did. She moved to North Melbourne after Cess died, and started a home that assisted war widows and unwed mothers and their children. I’d never seen her more fulfilled than when she was working at that home.
She was beloved by the children and mothers alike.
I worked there while I was studying to become a librarian. ”
ADEEM: “That must have been rewarding, working with babies?”
“It was, in its way. I was grateful for the work, of course, and grateful to earn money and have a place in the world again. But it wasn’t the babies that made me tick. I’m not maternal, not in the way some women are. I kept my distance from the babies, mostly. Except for one child.”
LIBBY: “Oh? Why was that?”
“There was a little boy I kept coming back to see, a boy who Ness adopted as a newborn. He was a sweet, quiet boy with dark hair like his Greek father’s, and already tall for his age.
Even after I finished my studies, even after I’d moved in to my own tiny cottage on Kenny Lane.
I found reasons to visit, to sit with him, to read to him.
He’d been placed for adoption, the file said, by a teenage mother who had given birth in a psychiatric facility. ”
[Off camera, a gasp can be heard.]
“A little boy called Peter.”