Free A Mother's Story by Rosie Batty Page B

and vegetables and iron?’ He wanted to make sure his offspring was being properly nourished. On the odd occasion he had money, he would run out and spend it all on organic fruit, which he would proceed to juice for me to drink. And that was fine, except that there were so many other things the baby needed before organic fruit juice. My dad gave me money for my fortieth birthday, which came and went with a whimper. I used the money to buy a change table, high chair and all the other equipment necessary for a baby.
    Greg was always obsessed with purging himself. He seemed to be detoxing all the time, as if he was always trying to expel something from himself. It was always done to extremes, whether it was with organic fruit cleanses or with substances altogetherfar less suited to polite society. One afternoon he phoned to say he was on his way to Menzies Creek and would swing by the fish markets. I assumed he was stopping to collect a couple of nice salmon fillets for dinner. But when he arrived, he pulled out a bag of fish guts, which he promptly proceeded to burn on an open fire in the yard before stripping down and smothering his naked torso with the ashes. He told me it was some sort of cleansing ritual. I told him he was an idiot, and that there was no way he was coming in the house smelling of burnt fish gut. He would laugh at himself, half-realising how odd he was being.
    But behind the quirkiness, something deeper and more sinister was simmering. And as the months passed, his behaviour became more and more disturbing. One evening he showed up at my house wearing a pair of goggles. It transpired that he thought the wire frames of his glasses were interfering with his brain waves, so he had removed the lens from the frames. He looked ridiculous but, coming as it did after the fish gut episode, I wrote it off as another one of his strange eccentricities.
    Every now and then I would be afforded a glimpse into just how troubled his mind was. But it would only ever be a fleeting glimpse – and usually only ever hinted at in a throwaway comment. Because he was convinced that everyone was out to get him, it was rare that Greg confided in anyone. So for him to tell me one afternoon that he sometimes heard voices was a major admission. It set off alarm bells, but because he would offer something up and then shut down completely – refusing to elaborate and making it clear it was not a topic for further discussion – I was left unsure how serious he was or whether in fact I had even heard it.
    I came to expect the ridiculous from him – and not knowing how else to handle it, I would just treat it with humour. Oneevening he came to me in the living room, holding a glass of water. ‘Have you put something in my water?’ he asked. ‘It tastes funny.’
    â€˜What would I have put in your water, Greg?’ I asked, part-exasperated, part-amused.
    â€˜Rosie,’ he asked in all seriousness, ‘are you trying to poison me?’
    I laughed it off. It was, I was almost certain, just another example of his odd sense of humour.
    I can remember him getting cross with me on another day because I reacted to one of his moments of madness by exclaiming, ‘You do know you are totally bloody deluded?’ He remembered that and brought it up years later.
    The confusing part was that when he wasn’t being barking mad, he had a sharp wit and we shared a good sense of humour. He never appeared to let things bother him. He lost jobs within weeks of getting them, he never had any money, he was living to a large extent relying on the kindness of strangers – and he would just potter around as if he had no cares in the world. It was only when I ventured a comment about how nice it would be to have a longer maternity leave that I discovered the insouciance was all a façade. He took it as a slight and arced up. At a fundamental level, he hated feeling inadequate.
    Was it wrong for me to want to