'We would have screamed at every official if we had known what was to come'
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For too long, John, Katie and I believed that if only Anna would try harder, she could overcome her depression. We urged her to exercise, to try again for her driver’s licence, which she had sat for twice and failed. Reminding her of how much talent she had, we encouraged her to update her résumé and send it out. But all she had the energy to do was one more form of self-medication: getting dolled up and going out on the train to meet men.
The calls became more frequent, and often they came at night. I was jolted out of a troubled sleep with “Mum! He’s knocked out my tooth!” Once, after she’d been missing for four agonising days: “Mum, a guy I met has been holding me prisoner but I got away! I ran down the street and a woman’s let me hide in her house. What should I do? He might be waiting outside!”‘
I told her to call a taxi. When she got home I paid the $95 fare, but even with us she was no longer safe. She began to put into words what John, Katie and I had suspected but didn’t want to acknowledge: “Part of me just wants to die.”
As the suicidal side of Anna’s mind became ever more prominent, at last I began to see that she needed help way beyond what her family could provide. I made some frantic phone calls of my own. To the police when she grabbed our butcher knife and tried to stab herself. To the ambulance when I found her unconscious on the floor of her room, with her lips blue and her eyes rolled back in her head.
I made hundreds of calls to try to get her help. I don’t blame the professionals who, even if they wished it were otherwise, could do so little. I do resent the ones who seemed to think I was overdramatising our situation. I feel sorry for the psychiatrist who was sent to our place as part of the crisis assessment and treatment team. We couldn’t wake up Anna, so he stood looking at her and the things she had with her in bed: a laptop, empty beer cans, several teddy bears and the black kitten we had adopted to give her a furry little reason to keep on living. I said to the doctor, “My daughter needs to be in a hospital.”
The psychiatrist shook his head sadly. “I’m sorry. My hands are tied.”
With her father. Photo: Courtesy of Mary K. Pershall and family
By the winter of 2014, she had deteriorated so much that she believed her bedroom was inhabited by avenging demons and they were in her head as well. She told me they were whispering such horrible suggestions to her that she couldn’t let me know what they were. After she tried to stab herself, John brought home a big steel box from Bunnings with a sturdy padlock; that’s where we stored the knives and the whiskey, the methylated spirits and the potato peeler. But she would still wake us up in the middle of the night, employing ever more inventive ways to harm herself. She grabbed a baseball bat and threatened to break her bones with it. She beat her head against the wall. She made her forehead bleed by bashing it with the sharp edge of a can of corn.
When she went out, to find men and drugs, the calls kept coming. And they were becoming more frightening. “Mum! Put $200 in my account, immediately! If you don’t they’re gonna stab me!” Perhaps inevitably, Anna met a man on the train who took her home and gave her ice. Just a few encounters with that drug pushed her further into psychosis. She now believed that John and I had been replaced by evil doppelgängers who were intent on doing her harm. In long phone conversations, she begged Katie to see the truth: “Listen to me! Mum and Dad aren’t who you think they are!”
It was all becoming too much. One harrowing weekend, when she disappeared two days before she was supposed to be going to a detox stint we’d arranged, the dreaded late-night phone call came again. It was her, raging at us. Finally, we said, “Wherever you are, you can’t come back here.”
By this time, Katie and her partner were living in a quiet little house near Wangaratta, in north-eastern Victoria. They said Anna was always welcome to stay with them. But there would be conditions: no drinking, no drugs, and Anna would be expected to get up and go to bed and have meals at times which resembled a normal human’s schedule. Anna found these rules too restrictive. She preferred to throw her fate in with men she could meet.
Now when my phone rang, the tone of the calls was intensifying. “This is Sunshine Hospital. Your daughter has been picked up by the Footscray police in a compromised state. She’s in the emergency department and she’s asking for you.”
John, Katie and I thought it was just a matter of time before we got “the call”. Much later, John told me he lived with an image of Anna jumping in front of a train. I worried that she would stop breathing in some random man’s bed, her heart halted by whatever combination of drugs she had managed to procure, and that the stranger beside her would not care enough about her to notice until it was too late. Katie prayed that if her sister had to die at the hands of one of the men she picked up, let it be quick. Once when I responded to my phone I heard, “This is the Northern Hospital. We have admitted your daughter to the psychiatric ward under the Mental Health Act.” If only they could have kept her there.
Anna was admitted to psych wards on several occasions after she left us, but only for a few days at a time. As the months passed, she herself came to understand that she was out of control and needed to be contained. But, at least in Victoria, you don’t get admitted to a locked psych ward just because you or your loved ones believe that you should be. One winter’s day in 2015, I got a call from Anna that brought a whole new set of worries, but also the unfamiliar stirrings of hope: “Mum, I don’t know how to tell you this … I’m up the duff!”
On a sunny Sunday afternoon in the late spring of that same year, when Anna was 18 weeks pregnant, we did at last receive our version of “the call”. But this police officer delivered a horror message that none of us had imagined. Our daughter had not stepped in front of a train. She had not stopped breathing, or been found raped and murdered. The kind voice of the officer informed me, as gently as he could, that my squishy angel of a baby, my quirky child, my gorgeous girl, had killed an innocent man.
In February 2017, Anna pleaded guilty to murder. She was sentenced to 17 years’ prison, with a non-parole period of 13 years. At the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre in Deer Park, Victoria, Anna is drug-free, receiving excellent help and doing well. Anna’s son was born healthy and is being raised by her sister, Katie.
Gorgeous Girl by Mary K. Pershall (Penguin Random House, $35) is out now. Lifeline 13 11 14
To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald or The Age.
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