An extract from HEAT 18

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This is the last time I’ll state – I did not kill my children…But enough, I know you’re not believing any of it…I have no more energy to battle with people who won’t hear. Try to imagine your life being spread out, ripped to pieces, examined, opinions cast, character assassinated, your every word, action, thought, doubted, and you’re told you don’t know yourself. – Excerpt from a letter from Kathleen Folbigg to her foster sister Lea Bown, June 2003.

Late in the afternoon, sometime in January 1989. Newcastle Beach. Hot. Hot. Hot.

Kathy dips her feet into the icy cold water and counts the ships on the horizon, one…two…three. She has not yet become the Kathleen Folbigg, she has not yet been picked apart. None of her children have been born yet. None of them have died.

With her eyes, she traces the path that the ships will take across the water and towards the BHP. The seaweed curls around her toes. Everyone at the beach is looking at her. She is sure of it. She can feel their sideways glances breaking and halting, bumping and sliding, across the curves of her skin. She tilts her arm from left to right in the sunlight and watches the way the tiny beads of water upon her skin wink and send their reflections outwards. She wonders if she has that pregnant glow that she’s read about in the magazines. She closes her eyes and wills herself to glow. She commands her body in a slow, rhythmic voice, radiate. Radiate.

The ships on the horizon sit motionless, lacking industriousness in a town that is slowly becoming de-industrialised. When she was younger there were mazes of steel pipes sticking out from the ground where the sand on the other side of the beach meets the grass. But the pipes are all gone now and the BHP has shrunk back further on the foreshore like a spider that has lost its web and no longer has a place to stand.