Irony, down the back.

My earliest memory is a police officer speaking to my dad at the top of our back stairs, and the sound of my mum wiping away her tears behind me, as she brushed my long, golden, wavy hair for school that day.

We sat at the glass table on the back veranda of our two-story Queenslander house, surrounded by never ending cane fields, with the morning sun rising and shining through the wooden cladding, while police officers flipped our house upside down.

I turned my head, breaking free of the brush, “What are they looking for Mum?” I asked, worryingly.

“I don’t know” Mum replied, lying quick, like her reaction to spin me back around.

Dad stood with a police officer, noticeably comfortable, like friends, which seemed strange to me, even at such a young age.

The officer asked, “We’re not going to find anything down the back, are we Will?” With a smile which translated to, “We know exactly what we’ll find down the back, but we have no intention of finding it”.

Dad replied, “Nah, mate” To which they both smugly laughed, together.

This made absolutely no sense to me at 5 years old, however 23 years later, with everything that I have learned in between, it all translates simply fine. I thought they were looking for our pet rabbit, which are illegal to have in Queensland - it was not too long after that I realised, it was not the rabbit they were pretending to look for, it was Dad’s green plants in the chicken-less chicken coop.

Will Green was my dad, "Greeny" as everyone called him, ironically enough. A small man height-wise, but as tough as nails and anger embedded, flowing deep through his visible veins. Shoulder length, wavy, golden-brown hair like me, and eyes clear blue like winter ocean water on a cloudless day. He had tan olive skin and one of those laughs that make you laugh even harder than what you were originally laughing at. Very little education, but a hardworking, cane planting, car fixing, garden raking, Aussie. He’d had it rough as a child, the son of an alcoholic, sexually abusive, wife-beating man who died of pneumonia while drinking himself to death in a freezing cold caravan. I never had the pleasure of meeting Grandad.

I refuse to understand why my mother thought it was a bright idea to let me catch the bus that day. There were still numerous police cars and drug vans outside our house as I waited at the bus stop 20 metres down the road. I can still feel the anticipation coursing through my body as I waited – thinking that as soon as I entered the bus, the other children were going to bombard me with questions, that I did not have an answer to.

In a small town, everyone knows where everyone lives, there was no escaping this.

The bus arrived, and I climbed on, with fear as oversized as my school bag. Then, the opposite of what I had expected to happen, happened. Silence pierced my ears louder than questions while at least 15 pairs of judgmental eyes stared straight inside my young soul. As a first grader, this really sets the tone for social anxiety as an adult.

I walked too far onto the bus, looking for a seat, without realising there was a spare one two rows from the front. I continued to walk, seeking, failing, their eyes setting me on fire, until it became too much so I spun around and quite literally ran to the front of the bus, increasing my embarrassment ten-fold. I found my safety and sunk into it while waiting for the longest bus ride of my life to begin.

As we drove past my house, decorated with flashing red and blue police lights, a high schooler from the back sang out,

“Ha! Greeny is getting busted!”

I sank even further into the seat, and into myself. The other older kids roared with laughter at his inside joke.

“Busted?” I searched inside myself, “What does “busted” mean?”.

I don’t remember what happened exactly after that, I do however, remember the next day.

Taunts from the other children at school followed me the entire day, about an article in the local paper telling of a drug raid that had occurred at my home. That’s how I found out that Dad was a drug dealer, and that the green plants in the chicken coop were illegal.

The word “illegal” was extremely frightening to me, and aggravating, purely because my childish brain couldn’t understand why my dad would intentionally do the wrong thing, knowing that if he was caught with those plants, he would go to prison, and I would no longer have a dad. That seemed selfish. I also remember being angry at Mum for condoning this, but then again, at 5 years old, you really don't have the mental maturity to understand this situation in its entirety.

That day was a blur of name calling and a fair amount of crying in the school library courtyard, over the thought of losing my family.

My friend, Kate, who was a lot more aware of the world around her than most at that age, sat with me as I cried, explaining to me that adults smoked it to get “high” and not to feel sad because her dad does it too.

“What does high mean?” I asked, imagining my dad floating, knowing that couldn’t possibly be the right answer, but not too far from the truth, really.

“They just act stupid when they smoke it” she answered, sure of herself.

At this point, I felt silly, I realised that I had obviously never worked out the difference between cigarettes and joints. That was it for me, I was furious at these home-wrecking green plants, and I was set on destroying every one of them when I got home from school, so that’s what I did.

I arrived home by bus and made the walk along our rainforest-like, picturesque garden, up the wooden back stairs and onto the back veranda, where Dad sat around the glass table, laughing, and filling the roof with thick, blue tinged smoke alongside two very large, long-haired, biker-bearded friends. I had seen these men before but suddenly I was more defensive around them then my previous encounters.

Dad greeted me “Hey baby, how was school?”

I ignored him, slid open the heavy sliding glass door and tried my hardest to slam it on my way through with little success.

I climbed up onto the kitchen bench and watched through the yellow stained-glass windows in secret, as Dad and the two men passed around what looked like a cigarette, but after my educational day, I now knew it wasn’t.

The more they laughed, the more my eyes filled with tears of anger as I thought about how they were “high” on this stupid plant that could ruin my family and had turned me into a walking target at school. The more I thought, the more ammunition I was able to build up to do what I thought was best for everyone. Those plants were going to get it.

I climbed off the kitchen bench, with wet hands from cleaning my face of tears, I opened the top drawer and pulled out mum’s kitchen shears. I ran on my tiptoes to the front timber door, turning the handle slowly and moving quickly and quietly through it so not to be seen, down the front stairs, through the garden pathways lined with river stones, to the back yard where I finally reached the chicken coop.

The wire homemade fence stood tall in comparison to me, with green shade cloth wrapping the entire outside. I can still feel the momentum build in my chest as I unlatched the gate and stepped over the threshold between life as I knew it, and consequences more severe than I could have imagined. My body filled with cortisol as my baby-like hands shook and began ferociously chopping at each plant.

One by one, the brown dirt floor on which I stood, quickly became a thick rug of star shaped green leaves and furry buds.

I was exhausted but worked quickly, determined, and not finished yet. I began to pull at the roots of the plants, ripping their leafless bodies out of the ground and launching them over the fence into the cane fields. I had nearly had enough, with very few left, I turned to move towards the remaining plants, and just as I did, in my peripheral vision, I saw him, but he was no longer my dad.

I had never known anger without words before that moment, his chest puffed as he became taller with every breath, his teeth and fists clenched in unison, his ocean blue eyes, now black with resentment. The green shade clothed fence quickly became a room of red walls for him, a raging bull locked inside, and me, no longer his daughter, but a walking target once more that day.

In that moment, I felt instant regret and extreme terror as my biological response to fear kicked in. I ran as fast as my young legs could take me, but in attempt to move past him, I stood no chance. He clutched me quickly, crushing my shoulders with his strong hands, stopping me instantly in my tracks. I screamed for Mum hysterically, knowing she was not yet home, and apologising to him profusely as he pushed me to the ground with his large, calloused hands, pressuring my neck and threatening my life. Thoughts of survival raced through my sad, young brain, and as my vision replicated his black eyes, I lost consciousness. I fought for my life, and if he hadn’t of stopped, for whatever reason, I would have lost.

I woke slowly with heavy blood-shot eyes, one barely open and the other resting in the dirt as I watched a slow, blurry flicker of green light from the irrigation system. Injured and unable to breathe without concentrated effort, I laid there for what felt like hours before my mum returned home from work and found me.

No one knows what happened to Dad after that day. He quite literally, for a lack of better words, disappeared off the face of the earth. His white Ford Falcon Ute sat in his rusted shed where he left it, and all his belongings remained. What I did find out, as an extremely emotional teenager, (obviously another bright idea from mum, thinking that was a suitable age to bestow life altering information on me) is that the crop which I destroyed, was a means of paying back a debt to the two biker-like men, who laughed with Dad on our veranda that day.

My theory is they found him in the process of attempting to end my life and decided to finish the job on him instead, as consequence of their money trees being shredded of any value, or they shared strong morals that disagreed with my father’s radical choice of corporal punishment.

Maybe both of my theories are correct, or neither, either way, they weren’t known to our small town, and both were also never seen again. There was, of course, minimal investigation, obviously due to the corruption of our small town’s justice system, alongside their desire to “not find anything down the back”.

My actions that day were to prevent losing my dad, and as a result, I did, ironically, devastatingly, but thankfully. The universe works in mysterious ways, perhaps it was inevitable, and I was just the collateral damage in speeding up the process.

This story is dedicated to anyone who has been a victim of domestic violence and/or childhood trauma. Seek support where able and necessary, find your sense of closure, reclaim control.

If you enjoyed my story, please give it some love, we all need some.