Book: Redemption - Part XVII - Chapter 15...SECTION THREE...

SECTION THREE
CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Fool’s Journey

January to June 1997

In September 1996, I had made an appointment for Tamara and myself to see Ann Ann for a reading, but couldn’t get in until late November. It would have been my third and Tamara’s first. By the time November came around, events in Kristen’s life ensured her need was greater so I gave her my appointment and made another for myself for February 1997. She was going to Ayr in December because Danny’s mother had asked him to take over the running her kiosk for her. It was adjacent to, but not connected to a caravan park on the outskirts of the town. When the girls’ readings were over Ann asked me if I had had any more dreams about her.

I only told her of the one I had before seeing her the first time because I had another before seeing her the second time. Her interpretation of the latter was that she had too much on her plate and needed to make some difficult choices. What those choices were I had no intention of asking but she told me anyhow. I would later look back on that time as a cautionary tale of what can happen when life spirals out of control. In November’s dream, water had poured in through the windows near her front door and flooded the floor. She thought it funny because during a recent storm water actually did come through those windows and flood the floor. She said she was waiting on her insurance assessment as we spoke. She laughed even louder when I told her that in the dream she tried to use her vacuum cleaner to extract the water only it kept breaking down. Her laugh seemed forced and unnatural then, but I knew she was doing it tough personally, primarily due to her phenomenal success.

By February 1997, my life was very different to what it had been in November. Although I was still having dreams about Ann, all I wanted to talk about was the Tarot. I had a zillion questions and as I had to start somewhere I asked: “How do I clean the cards?” Steve’s reaction to my bringing cards into the house was to sit on the front steps for hours drinking and feeling sorry for himself. When I asked him what his problem was he said I didn’t know what I was dealing with. I wasn’t strong enough to know what to do if I saw death in the cards. I didn’t even know how to clean the cards. That bothered me because I didn’t and it continued to bother me when none of the books I read mentioned it.

Cleaning the cards, Ann said, is a very important part of a Tarot reader’s ritual because it breaks up the energy of the previous reading. Ann was very good at what she did but by far her greatest asset was her easy way of explaining things in simple-to-understand terms. There was nothing secret or mysterious about it. I only had to return the cards to the deck one by one, separating them as I did so. I was glad I asked because I had been putting them in a clump on the top of the deck.

At the end of my reading, Ann gave me my first ‘official’ Tarot lesson by selecting a few cards at random and asking me what I believed each represented. Sometimes referred to as "The Fool’s Journey", the story of the Major Arcana is the archetypical path we all must take from birth to death. It reflects the more profound lessons we must learn whereas the Minor Arcana relates more to our everyday existence. Ann ended the session by urging me to ring anytime I needed clarity on this or that card and to get myself a mini Tarot deck to keep in my handbag. One never knows, she said, when one may need to give someone a reading. My mini Rider Waite deck has gone from handbag to handbag and I have lost count of the number of readings I have given with them. The Waite may be my least favourite Tarot deck but it was the only mini deck available to me at the time. I have since seen another but I liked it even less.

As I was leaving, I paused at a table near her front door where she kept business cards and pamphlets because one caught my eye. I hadn’t noticed it before and I’m sure it wasn’t there in November. When I asked her what The Success Factor was she said it was a wonderful centre in town, a place I should visit when I got the chance. I never did, but some years later I met and went on to become very good friends with the lady who, just months earlier, had taken it over. She changed its named from “The Stress Factor” to “The Success Factor” because she thought the former an odd name for a wellbeing centre. Strange things like that, and the way I was led to people like Ann Ann the Extraordinaire, were what this book was originally supposed to be about. When I finished it I had no idea what I was going to do with it. It would probably have gone the way of my other literary efforts, although I still have The House in Crescent Avenue, the short story I wrote in the early 1980s.

I saw Ann for the last time in April. Since March I had been getting messages of tumultuous change in readings I did for myself. As most of my questions concerned my job I found it difficult to accurately interpret them. I desperately wanted to leave but as my wage was paying for our ‘new’ used car I felt I couldn’t. In reading after reading I got cards like Death, The Tower and Judgement which told me inevitable and irreversible change was coming. The Devil mirrored the debt hanging over my head and The Hierophant was representative of the dictatorial mindset of my employer. The Lovers showed me I had a choice, and The High Priestess may have been advising me to seek out someone like Ann Ann or telling me to use my own intuition. By the same token it could also have been telling me all cannot be revealed yet. The World, however, told me a cycle was completing so perhaps I should leave my job……

I gave up counting the number of times I rang Ann but only twice did I talk to her. The first time was in March. I needed to ask about two specific cards that, when coming together, she said indicated physical death. She put my mind at ease by saying it doesn’t have to mean I or a member of my family will die, only that I will hear of a death. For years I deferred to people more experienced than me but all I still see in those two cards is worry and change. The second time I spoke to her she agreed to “squeeze me in” because of all the Major Arcana cards I was continually getting.

On examining my notes she said I have been taking steps which will see me move into a position with more responsibility in the near future. I was taking steps alright, but not the kind that leads to promotion. My already strained relationship with my supervisor came to a head the previous year when I was still doing the Teatime shift. The oven mitts I had to use to take hot trays out of the regithermic oven were worn down to the cotton lining, rendering them all but useless. The Day girls couldn’t get their heads around the concept of alternating front and back so the mitts could be evenly worn. I was still furious when I got home and couldn’t believe it when Steve said he didn’t know why I was so angry. All I had to do was ring Sandra in the morning, he said in his matter-of-fact way, and ask her to provide me with a written directive ordering me to use those mitts. His years as a union delegate had taught him well. Sandra reacted exactly the way he said she would. I later heard she spent a good part of the morning searching for usable mitts and when she couldn’t find any she sent two pairs down to Glenda for repair. Glenda’s refusal left her with no choice but to borrow some from another house until her order came in. In her determination to impress her superiors, Sandra was reluctant to spend one cent more of her allocated budget than absolutely necessary.

In the beginning of May, life upped the ante on me when a plain white card Australian Tarot reader and author, Paul Fenton-Smith, called the “Blank Card” began appearing in my spreads. In his book, The Tarot Revealed, which I had just bought, Fenton-Smith likened it to the blank rune. For reasons I could not then explain, such a prospect resonated with me. Yet, I had never even seen runes, let alone used them. I was surprised to find a plain white card in the Rider Waite deck when I opened the box because there had been nothing like it in my Mythic Tarot deck. Ann said many readers simply tossed it away or used it as a spare. The interesting thing was that after I started using it, it came up in just about every reading I did. At a time when I needed Ann the most I could not reach her. It was as if she had vanished from the face of the earth. In my desperation to learn more about this card I scoured book shops and libraries but found no further reference to it. I was wasting my time and energy for the answer was in Fenton-Smith’s book all the time: Life has plans for me that are greater than those I have for myself.

In July 1996, Sandra told me I would have to share the laundry with a woman seconded from another house. In-house laundries, like in-house kitchens before them, were making way for a central laundry. But until it was up and running, our laundry, being the most modern, would remain operational. Cooper House was the most modern building in the complex. Built to replace a previous house, it was beige brick and glass. When she told me Jan would be sharing my job I chose not to react and was glad of it. When she told me Jo would be sharing my job I couldn’t help the feeling she wasn’t just being a bitch. Something else was afoot. Sandra was vindictive and I knew it was only a matter of time before she got revenge for the oven mitts incident, but this had Barbara’s signature written all over it. Barbara was the nursing supervisor and what a cunning, manipulative piece of work she was. She came across as all sweetness and light, went on tours to Nepal, and had even had an audience with the Dalai Lama. But I saw her for what she was and she knew it.

Jo was a surprise in so many ways. She was funny, interesting, and a fighter, I was soon to discover, who knew her rights. At the house she came from Jo got paid for public holidays if she normally would have worked on the days they fell. When she realised she hadn’t been paid for Exhibition Wednesday she summoned the union. It was the most fun I had had in a long time. In the ensuing battle, I asked for and received back pay for all the public holidays I had been entitled to but never paid for. It was the sweetest of victories. Sandra tried to feign ignorance by saying she never rostered me on those days so I was not entitled to be paid. But, as the union organiser said, the moment I started working set days, and had worked those days for some time, it didn’t matter if I was rostered on or not.

When the Day girls and cleaners got wind of it they decided they, too, were entitled to back pay. I told them to confront Sandra and make their claim if they felt so strongly about it. They didn’t. At a staff meeting in March 1997, I accused them of being gutless bastards when they passed up the chance to raise their concerns about a health and safety matter they had been whinging about for months. I was so mad I forgot I was going to hospital the next day for minor operation and would be away for a few days. I just couldn’t take any more. Day after day it was the same old story. When passing the laundry to have their lunch in the adjacent staff room the Day girls often stopped in for a chat, only their idea of a chat was to bitch about Sandra or to whinge about their miserable lives. It was the same when the cleaners emptied their buckets and put their mops out to dry. Their shifts had been decreased yet again but they still had the same number of rooms to clean.

When I returned to work I found a letter addressed to me on the time sheet, only it wasn’t the ‘Please explain’ I thought it was. The federal government was changing the way the aged care industry was to be funded. In a nutshell, accreditation meant that if aged care providers wanted their funding arrangements to continue they must meet certain criteria. The letter went on to say that we, as employees, needed to become more proactive and multi-skilled, and it encouraged us to participate in the transitionary process by joining discussion groups and offering suggestions.

I decided to attend the first meeting to see what it was about even though Jo said it would be a waste of time. I knew she was probably right, but I had had enough and I was tired. Any excuse to get out of work would do just fine. As it turned out, I was the only one who did and the woman chairing the ‘meeting’ commended me for my ‘participation’. It was the usual blah, blah, blah, but she did provide me with valuable information. A major part of the accreditation process was to revolve around workplace health and safety, something she admitted the industry was lacking in. I couldn’t agree more.

“What will make our working environment safer?” I asked Jo when I returned from the meeting. “Where do you want me to start?” she replied laughing. We put in for everything we could think of knowing there was not a damn thing Sandra or Barbara could do about it. We got the bench raised to the correct height. This was especially important in Jo’s case she as was a good six inches taller than me. I once asked Glenda, three inches taller than me, how she coped and she just shrugged her shoulders and said “You manage”. We got spring-loaded wheeled trolleys so we no longer had to drag heavy bags of soiled linen, another issue I had taken up with Sandra in the past. She ignored me then but after I injured my back, she started having the bags weighed to see if they were within the legitimate range. They weren’t. The laundry chute was another bone of contention as some of the nursing staff often threw soiled or bloodied bedding and clothing down the chute. As part of a safer working environment we demanded and got a colour-coded bag system to replace the previously inefficient and usually ignored system. Shelving was built to store bulk detergent to spare our backs and ongoing maintenance of all equipment was to be immediately implemented. While all this was going on the girls upstairs could see nothing bad was happening to us, yet still they were too scared to ask for even the smallest improvements. It was beyond pathetic.

I woke suddenly one morning with the knowledge that something was going to happen. When I got to work I told Jo that Sandra and Barbara would be down to see us at some point during the day. “No matter what they say, stay calm. Don’t react. Say nothing. Let me do all the talking.” I had not had a dream. I had not heard a disembodied voice. I just woke knowing they were going to try something.

It was after lunch before they came. Their mission was to inform us that we would be adding the laundry of yet another house to our daily duties. Because of this we must become more disciplined to get more out of each day. True to her word, Jo sat silently through it all. She trusted me implicitly, even though maintaining her silence got harder as Sandra continued baiting the trap Barbara had plotted. When they thought they had won I sprung my own trap. “Certainly,” I said as sweetly as possible. Jo cast me a look of shock and dismay. Had I gone over to the dark side? “But”, I continued, “When our day ends, we will be turning off those machines, regardless of what they are doing. We will be switching off that light and we will be locking that door behind us on our way out.”

It was a beautiful sight to see them storm off in defeat. It was a beautiful feeling. Unpaid overtime, a given in that house, was something they knew neither of us would consent to. I did when I first started because I didn’t want to put extra work on the girl doing the Supper shift until Steve told me nothing would change if I did. “So what if it snowballs”, he replied to my argument that that’s would happen if everyone just walked out when their shift ended. “Let it snowball. That’s the only way staff numbers and hours will be increased.” “But the residents are old and frightened”, I said in my own defence. “If we don’t make their lives better who will?” “Can’t you see what’s happening?” Steve continued. “They’re using you, using your compassion. What do you think will happen if you fall over? According to your time sheet, you are no longer on duty. You should not be on the premises after 6.30. Ask Sandra what happens if you get injured at work when your time sheet said you signed out at 6.30.”

I did ask Sandra and she could not look me in the eye when she said she was sure I would be “looked after”. From that moment on I did not work one minute beyond 6.30pm. In time, the girl doing the Supper shift saw the light and left at precisely 8pm. The Day girls had been furious to find dishes in the sink the next morning. They were still whinging about it when I came in at 2.30, the time they should leave but rarely did. After I explained what happened they argued their unfinished work would fall on the Teatime girl – me. “So be it”, I said and left it at that.

Who Barbara and Sandra had in mind for the laundry I will never know, but the look they cast me on their way out the door was truly menacing. I had been within my rights and they knew it but when I refused Sandra had to get creative to get more out of each day. One week I started at 6.30am and Jo started at 9.30am. The second week, our shifts were reversed. When I did my next reading I thought the Blank Card would be gone, that the events of that day were the great unknown I was being forewarned about, but it was still there.

In a few weeks time, I was setting off on a driving holiday with Steve and two friends so I asked the cards if we were still going. Unbelievably, I got a concise, affirmative answer. The Blank Card was not present and there were only two Major Arcana cards. At work the next day I couldn’t stop thinking about that so during my lunch break I pulled out my mini deck to ask the one question I had been too afraid to ask before: Will we be involved in an accident on our trip?

The cards I got made me shudder: Death (change and transformation), The Tower (sudden and dramatic upheaval), Wheel of Fortune (fate, chance, destiny), The Devil (debt, control, bondage), The Hanged Man (sacrifice and surrender), The Chariot (car, triumph over opposing forces), The Lovers (choice), Judgement (rebirth and renewal), The World (completion of a cycle), and the Blank Card (the great unknown). Being a driving holiday, I was naturally thinking car accident and those cards did nothing to alleviate my fear. Should I tell Steve? Should I tell Ralph and Marita? Did I have the right to tell them? Did I have to right to not tell them? What should I do?

The first thing I did do when I got home was to open Paul Fenton-Smith’s book to see what his spreads revealed. Until then I had always done the ten-card Celtic Cross. His five-card Spiritual Direction layout told me if I had faith and trusted what the universe had in store for me I would be protected. It didn’t say we wouldn’t have an accident, only that I would be protected. We would be protected.

We left Brisbane as planned on June 4^th, my father’s birthday, to pick up our travelling companions at Caboolture before setting off to Carnarvon Gorge. We hadn’t even reached the highway when Steve nearly collided with a motor cyclist. No matter, we survived that and the long intermittent stretches of gravel roads we had to travel to get to Carnarvon Gorge. Once there, we spent four gorgeous days trekking over beautiful but hazardous terrain and three bitterly cold nights shivering in our tents. For the next leg of our journey we travelled the Matilda Highway to Longreach. It may have been paved but it was a seemingly endless stretch of road through seemingly endless terrain. It was easy to understand how accidents happen when massive road trains, caravans and other vehicles traverse it on a daily basis. Just outside Ilfracombe, not far from Longreach, we had another near miss when an eagle almost came through the windscreen. Two of them had been feasting on the carcass of a kangaroo and one was not finished. Its tail feathers brushed the roof of the car as it flew over us. I had been nodding off just prior to the incident but I was decidedly awake afterwards. We arrived in Longreach in the late afternoon, checked into our motel, and took a stroll around the town before having dinner. The next day we spent several hours walking through The Stockman’s Hall of Fame and Outback Heritage Centre. Longreach is not a town I would go back to but I am glad I went. After lunch, Marita and I took a ride on a Cobb and Co coach and in the morning, we were on the road again.

The Stockmans' Hall of Fame and Outback Heritage Centre, Longreach, Queensland

 Our plan was to stop at Charters Towers to refuel the car and ourselves before continuing on to the Atherton Tablelands. We were making good time, too, until the last twenty kilometres or so when we thought we had blown a tyre. Steve immediately pulled over to the side of the road so he and Ralph could deal with it. The tyre was fine. All the tyres were fine. This happened every few hundred metres and it was incredibly frustrating because we never found anything wrong. By the time we approached the town it was mid afternoon. The problem was a loose wheel nut, a seemingly impossible situation in light of the number of times we checked the tyres, rims, nuts and axles. The motel we checked into was fair to bad and we believe that, along with the weird wheel situation, contributed to a growing feeling of dissatisfaction on the part of our travelling companions. They said they were too tired to bother eating so Steve and I went out to dinner while they slept. After dinner we went for a stroll down the main street. The golden glow emanating from lights inside grand old buildings had me thinking of the gold rush and I couldn’t help but wonder what the town was like in its heyday.

Charters Towers, Queensland

From ‘The Towers’ we made our way to Peter’s place at Mareeba. After passing through Innisfail we took the Palmerston Highway to Atherton which took us through the dairy towns of Millaa Millaa and Malanda. The view from the range was beyond breathtaking: rolling green hills set against a backdrop of clear blue sky. Peter didn’t live in Mareeba itself but rather on the Kennedy Highway, midway between Mareeba and a little town called Walkamin.

Ralph and Marita decided to leave us in morning. Peter had sensed their discomfort and told them where and when they could hail a southbound coach from the road if they so chose. Our original plan after leaving Peter’s place was to check out the famed Kuranda Markets and, depending on the weather, take a ride on the Skyrail. On our way down the coast road we were going to check out several places we had heard about, spend a day or two in Ayr with Kristen, and a night in Rockhampton to see John. I was sad to see our companions leave us but I know that was the way it had to happen. Life had plans for me that were greater than those I had for myself.