Completely Exposing Himself

It’s 2:52am on Saturday, October 12. I'm sitting here at the desk in my room at the Intercontinental, and I have the curtains open. Below, you can see a photo of the view from one of the windows. If you look closely, you will notice a couple of people walking across the bridge, which surprised me at this time.

I still have this sickly feeling in my stomach after Nanny's death. My brother is flying in from London on Thursday for her funeral, and we have been asked to speak. We have also been asked to be pallbearers, along with Nanny's biological grandchildren. I figure my emotions will go one of two ways on the day: I'll either be super emotional or not emotional at all. I expect it will be the former.

Nanny would not like me staying here at the Intercontinental because I'm too scared to stay at the house by myself. She would have been so angry and told me not to: (a) waste the money on the hotel and (b) talk about such nonsense. Nanny, of course, would have let me stay at her house, which I would have done, but that's not a possibility now.

I’ll tell you one thing she would have hated: I ordered a bowl of ice cream with chocolate topping earlier, and it cost me $26. That isn't as expensive as other food I've purchased here through room service, but I thought $26 was particularly ridiculous. Below, you can see the ice cream.

I’ve been thinking about my mother’s experience at an all-girls school and comparing it with my own. She went to Seymour College—back then, I believe it was called PGC. She was a boarder, and she absolutely loved it. She still has her core group of friends from those days, and they all meet a couple of times a year.

Out of the eight schools I attended, three were private all-girls schools. Two of them were fine, but one of them was awful. If I ever had a daughter, I would have never sent her to St Peter’s Girls’ School. The culture there is incredibly bitchy, and while I was never formally bullied, I was very deliberately excluded and made to feel unwelcome by the other students.

The girls there were incredibly mean, and I’ve never felt so strongly that I didn’t belong somewhere in my life. I started at Saints in Year 8, and I was sent there against my will because I loved Scotch and had to leave all of my friends—and my whole life there—when we moved house. I wasn’t used to an all-girls environment, but everything else felt familiar, like the uniforms, especially the hats we had to wear in public at all times. Saints is an Anglican school, and every morning before classes we had chapel, where the entire school attended a service before going about the day.

At Scotch, I had been in the cool group of girls. We weren’t smoking cigarettes or pot at that age, but we were still considered popular. In junior school, they called us the BP’s—the Bitch Patrol—but by Year 7 our image softened. When I started at St Peter’s Girls’, I didn’t have any friends. I wasn’t pretty or athletic; I think I was a bit of a weirdo. At lunchtime, I would sit alone in the library, not reading novels but flicking through textbooks. The popular girls excluded me from everything—classwork, lunchtime groups, and any kind of social interaction. Sometimes, they even laughed at me.

I remember one girl whose name was Holly. She made a comment to me during art class that has stuck with me all this time. We were all sitting around a table making something, and Holly said I reminded her of an actress in a movie called Heavenly Creatures. Someone else commented that the particular actress was really ugly—which, by the way, she is not, but I’m just repeating what was said during art class. Holly just looked at me and said, "Yes, I know." I said to her, "That's not very nice," and she just responded, "I'm just telling the truth." All the girls around the table laughed. Holly had this incredibly nasty look on her face, and I'll never forget it.

When I got home from school that night, I went to my room and cried a lot.

I think my unhappiness at Saints had a lot to do with why my parents moved me to Loreto at the end of Year 9. It was an elitist school that seemed to celebrate nastiness and had a culture of exclusion and singling out anyone who was different. I'm friends with some of the girls I went to school with on Facebook, and I see they've sent their daughters there, and I can't help but feel bad for them. I hope they have a successful educational journey, but the school reminds me of so many reasons why women can be so awful to other women. More often than not, they were awful to me.

I’m not a victim of those days, but I do think my experience at St Peter’s Girls’ School helped shape who I am today. It taught me how I want to treat people, and it set a standard for how I like to be treated in return—though I’m not always as strict about enforcing that for myself as I should be.

Shifting from Saints Girls to Loreto felt like running from a big, nasty monster straight into the arms of someone loving, gentle, and safe. My year at Loreto was one of my favourites, and the girls there more than made up for the genuinely horrible ones at Saints.

Tonight I’ve also been thinking about something else. When I was a young kid, my friend Melanie and I went for a sleepover at another friend’s house — Emma’s.

The three of us had our sleeping bags laid out in a circle and her Father came in to read us a story. While he was doing this, his dick was hanging out of his boxer shorts.

I can't remember him touching it, but he was looking at it and it was extremely confusing. I just remember looking at him. Really looking at his face and at his dick too. I went to see Emma's mother in her bedroom and asked her if I could go home. She said I couldn't, telling me my parents were out that night and there was no way to reach them. 

The next morning when my parents were picking me up, I can recall his dick dangling out of the same boxer shorts as he packed up my sleeping bag. But there was something not right about how the night before, he sat there in such close quarters reading a book to the three of us—completely exposing himself.

I never spoke to my parents about it and only told Nanny really just to tell her I’d seen a dick.  She told my Mum who then said I wouldn’t be going over to Emma's house anymore and I thought that was it.

However, the other girl who was at the house that night, Melanie, told her parents, and they called the police. We were both sent to specialised counsellors, and he ended up going to court. Apparently, he was a serial exposer, but I don’t think he ever served any jail time.