Spirit Whispers

Charmaine Wilson

Copyright © 2011 Charmaine Wilson

ISBN: 978-0-9806729-6-1

Published by Fontaine Press

P.O. Box 948, Fremantle, Western Australia

www.fontainepress.com

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Chapter 1

Early Days

Some say that psychics are born, not made. I’m not sure whether they’re right or not, but as a child I was not aware of my psychic abilities, although in hindsight there were signs of things to come. Perhaps the facility is there for everyone and life’s events either give us reason to open those doors, or they don’t. Perhaps certain people are destined from the beginning to experience life in such a way that spirit has an opportunity to work through them. All I know is that everything I have been through in my life has led me to where I am today, and I believe that I am where I was destined to be.

When I was born, my brother Martin really wanted a little brother, so instead of my chosen name, Charmaine, he called me George. My earliest memory is of Martin sleepwalking and waking me up from a deep sleep. I remember being frightened that there was someone in my room. Martin simply curled up on the end of my bed and continued sleeping. According to my mother we were very close, so close that I barely spoke a word until I was four. My brother spoke for me, always telling mum of my precise needs, never getting it wrong. It was not until he went to preschool that I finally found my voice. In hindsight, I’ve often wondered if we were telepathic, but as a child it just seemed normal to me.

We lived in Ingham, North Queensland, and the house was always filled with the scent of mangoes; mango chutney to be precise. My Grandpop, Mervyn, boiled up enough chutney to sink a battleship. Grandpop’s was such a strong brew; our house was virtually fermented with the smell of the stuff. He used to hand it out to all the local barmaids and shop owners as gifts, but they eventually handed it back because he had made it too spicy for human consumption! Back into the pot it would all go, with Grandpop adding even more mangoes to make it edible. To this day, I cannot eat mangoes. It was all too much for a five-year-old.

My parents divorced when I was five, and we travelled in Grandpop’s old Holden from Ingham to Brisbane, where we caught a train to Sydney. A week later, Grandpop sent the cat and the bird via train to us. He had put the cat in a pine fruit box and nailed the lid down. When mum opened the lid, she found a string of cheerios (little red cocktail sausages) in the box with the cat. It turned out that Grandpop had forgotten to put food in the box before he nailed it shut, and the cheerios were the only things he could push through the holes! Needless to say, they lay untouched in the box when the cat arrived in Sydney... We moved around a fair bit, as mum settled into her new life. I remember the song Bridge Over Troubled Waters by Simon and Garfunkel was a hit at the time. As young as I was, I would cry when I heard it. It was our song, Martin’s and mine. It always reminds me of those days when we clung together as children in a new place. Mum got a job in a service station where she met John, my stepfather. John was perhaps the first person to open my mind to the possibility of other dimensions. As a seven-year-old, I would listen spellbound as he related his theories of ghosts and alien life. John was also a talented artist and he painted mum’s old car bright blue with flowers all over it. Very fitting for the era! We first moved to Bankstown as a family and before too long, our new brother, Patrick, arrived and things began to settle down again. I was always eager to help out and loved to wash up at my mum’s friends’ houses. Mum would sit and chat with her friends and I would virtually polish the kitchen whilst they did so. I was always a welcome visitor.

Mum was a bad asthmatic so we had to do a lot more housework than our peers, and we did it whining and arguing all the way. We fought constantly. At her wit’s end, Mum would threaten to tell John when he came home. It didn’t deter us even though she always made good with the threats. Martin was always first to ‘get the belt’ and I would lie on my bed, terrified, waiting for my turn. Martin would scream blue murder even before you heard the belt connect, but I wasn’t quite so smart. I would hold stubbornly, refusing to make a single sound until it really hurt. Very often, this meant I’d cop twice the hiding Martin did. It was traumatic, but not uncommon in those times for fathers to dish out similar punishments. We just accepted it. Most of the time, I was a very good and quiet little girl - when my brother wasn’t around. There was an area down in our backyard where Martin told me some kids had burnt to death because they were playing with matches. Of course, I believed him and kept away. I believed everything my brother told me. I was such a gullible and open child. He would torment me constantly, always teasing and threatening me in the way big brothers often do. I now believe he was my greatest teacher throughout my childhood and teenage years. Even so, I think I may possibly have been the most tea towel-flicked sister in the world. Life was complicated and there were always issues, but through it all, Martin and I always referred to each other as the ‘real sibling’ and we stuck together no matter what.

The other constant in my life was Grandpop, who also lived in Sydney at the time. He was always up to mischief and seemed so full of life to me. I knew that nothing bad could ever happen as long as he was around. He went on a cruise to Fiji when I was about seven and we all went to look at the cruise ship. I was so envious! My imagination was fuelled by his adventures and I remember feeling like a pirate princess when he brought me back some exotic necklaces made of apple seeds.

Some of my best memories of my grandfather are from Bankstown in the 1970s. He was funny in a typical Australian way. He used to drive to the pub and I would wait in the car while he drank inside. He would come out at regular intervals with a soft drink and chips and make sure I was ok. On the drive home one night, I kept hearing these little ‘bump bump bump’ noises. I looked out the window and saw that the noise was coming from the wheels as we drove over the lane markers in the middle of the highway.

“Grandpop, why are those little things in the middle of the road?” I asked, as he ran over them again - ‘bump bump bump’.

“That’s how you know that you’re driving on the wrong side of the road,” Grandpop informed me. Unaware that there might have been better ways, I accepted his answer and settled back down in my seat, as the car swerved merrily all over Princess Highway.

I guess you could say that I had a few ‘near death experiences’ as a passenger in Grandpop’s car! I know now how lucky I was not to have been involved in an accident, but as a little girl it never occurred to me that someone who loved me as much as Grandpop did would put me in harm’s way. Grandpop eventually had to leave Sydney when he sideswiped sixteen cars in one go after a night at the pub. He came home, hitched up the caravan and drove all the way back to Queensland.

I was a quiet child and much preferred the characters in my books to real people. Once, I heard Grandpop comment to mum that it was unhealthy for me to be in my room reading all the time. But I didn’t care what they said. Enid Blyton caught me up in tales of fairies and gnomes. I was spellbound at the possibility that there was a fairy kingdom and that little people really did exist. In fact, I was convinced they did. After all, I had seen things...

I can clearly remember one occasion when a man, whom I suspected was a ghost, came and sat on the end of my bed. He was quite old and I was more than a little scared though I knew instinctively that he meant no harm. He just sat there and looked at me and then just as quickly as he came, he left. I thought he might have been related to my stepfather, but because I was not sure if he had really been there at all, I kept quiet. If Martin had known, he would have teased me, so I kept these kinds of secrets between me and my dog. I loved all animals and would despair at hurting one single thing, even an ant. I had begged and begged mum for a dog, so she took me to an animal shelter to choose one. Mum had her eye on a nice little dachshund who was very cute. She was quite dismayed when I picked the ugliest mongrel there because I felt sorry for him. We called him Pooch and I spent many hours under the mulberry tree telling him of my childhood woes. The days of Enid Blyton, mulberry trees and sharing secrets with Pooch came to an end when my father lost a leg in an accident involving a drunken friend. In 1975, when I was nine years old, we moved up to Brisbane to start a new life and Dad moved to Brisbane as well. In many respects, I left my childhood behind.

I was amazed at how laid-back the schools were in Queensland compared to what I had been used to. At Yagoona we wore ties and black school shoes - at Ormiston they wore thongs. It was such a culture shock for me. The kids were wilder and I was determined to fit right in. I learned how to climb a tree and promptly and embarrassingly got stuck in it. I had already developed a strong love for music, but now I began to enjoy much raunchier tones than any eleven-year-old should. The Sweet was big at that time as were Alice Cooper and Led Zeppelin, and I started to turn the volume right up. I forgot about Enid Blyton and smoked my first cigarette at eleven, convinced it was cool to be bad.

Of course, to my brother I could never be cool – and he felt he had the market cornered in terms of badness. He was happy to demonstrate his excellent techniques at every opportunity, inventing many creative ways to torture and humiliate me. One particular incident sticks out from that time. My father was always a very determined person and with one leg or two, he would do his leatherwork and take it to the markets. Martin and I would help him when we spent weekends there. I had a horrific cold one day when we were doing some leatherwork for him and my sniffling was driving Martin mad. Menacing me with a stud gun, my dear brother demanded I blow my nose into a plastic bag. It was totally disgusting and just the sort of humiliation that Martin enjoyed dishing out! Of course, he told as many people as he could, which didn’t help me much in the cool stakes. Luckily, I had other charms up my sleeve. The boys thought I was beautiful and I was becoming very popular for all the wrong reasons. Time moves on and kids turn into teenagers. My own teenage transformation left behind little trace of the quiet withdrawn girl I had once been. My middle name changed from Ann to Trouble, with a capital T.

By this time, Grandpop was back on the scene. Of course, I had grown up a lot and my attitude towards him had changed. In the way that most grandfathers annoy their teenage granddaughters, he annoyed me. I’d bake a cake and leave it to cool so I could ice it, and come back to find Grandpop had snaffled about a third of it off to his caravan. Dinnertime was always a circus. My stepfather would eat his steak raw, so I would make a barricade of sauce bottles and saltshakers to avoid any possibility of seeing his dinner stand right up and ‘moo’ at me. Martin complained loudly that we all munched like disgusting pigs and would often take his dinner to the phone table to spare his delicate sensibilities. I’d be left at the table between John’s gory plate load and Grandpop. Every time I’d blink or look the other way, Grandpop would pinch the juiciest piece of meat or roast potatoes right off my plate. Now, I liked my roast potatoes - I still do - but so did Grandpop and there was no stopping him. He infuriated me, but always made me laugh. Eventually, Grandpop had to leave the area when he reversed straight out of the driveway and smacked into a parked car that belonged to a Jehovah’s Witness. True to form, Grandpop drove back up the driveway, hitched up his caravan and hightailed it to the Sunshine Coast where he stayed until he was convinced the coast was clear.

I was desperate to fit in at high school. Yes, it was cool to be bad, but what I was really looking for was love, acceptance, a sense of belonging and being an important part of something. If that was going to come from hormone-enriched boys and friends who smoked, drank and lied to their parents, so be it! I was up for anything. Although I acted streetwise, inside I just felt lost and sad. My school friend, Joanne, remembers how obviously sensitive and emotionally open I was at the time, which was a recipe for disaster in that environment. The wholesome worlds created by Enid Blyton certainly seemed very, very far away. After all, it was the late 70’s - currant buns and fairies really had no place in an era of punk rock and casual sex. Joanne had moved to the area around the same time as I had and was as lost in her environment as I was. We had sleepovers occasionally, giggling ourselves sick and comparing notes about boys, the perils of vile older brothers – and boys.

On one of those occasions, we thought it might be fun to experiment with a makeshift ouija board. Who or what we intended to communicate with, I don’t know, but under our trembling teenage hands, the cup spelled out all kinds of specific and frightening things. Jo thought I was moving the cup and I thought she was moving the cup. At one point, my cat Marmaduke wandered into the room, hissed like a demon and tore off again like the hounds from hell were chasing him. Scary stuff! To this day we don’t know what was moving the cup, but we scared ourselves rigid that night and I cowered in the corner, absolutely terrified and refusing to speak until my parents came home. It was all too real for me. After this introductory foray into the world of ouija, we backed off from any further psychic experiments. My brother, Martin, had a crush on Jo all through high school and they dated on-and-off for some time, which made maintaining our friendship awkward at times. Most of my adventures depended on Martin knowing nothing about my after-school activities. After all, he still had the power to make sure I ‘got the belt’ and he wasn’t afraid to use it. Joanne’s father died in 1977 and not long afterwards, she left the school and we lost touch for many years.

I was a very social teenager who had many friends and used my days at school to socialise. My best friend in high-school was Marjon Kok, who had the most disgusting brother, Dirk. My first day at high school, nice and fresh in my new school uniform, was when I met Dirk as he wiped his blood nose all down my sleeve. I was very upset and turned to the girl next to me as we sat waiting for instructions when I spied him again.

“See that boy? He is a pig!”

To which Marjon replied, “That’s my brother and yes, he is a pig!”

A friendship was formed for life.

Another friend I had for many years was Hope.

My friend Hope had the lying-to-the-parents factor down to a fine art, and a passion for bad boys on motor-bikes to match my own, so I gravitated towards her and together we went off the rails. I got drunk for the first time at fourteen and went on to try nearly all types of recreational drugs, always looking for a quick fix for the unsettled feeling I had inside. Hope was never far away and we egged each other on to try new experiences and break new rules. Martin and I kept up our fighting schedule without a break, often having screaming matches at school in front of the whole crowd. He was by no means an angel, but still he watched my every move and anything I did wrong was either held over my head for blackmail purposes or reported in detail to our parents. I was in fact a brilliant student, streamed into the advanced maths class and the top commercial class, and I always received best marks at school. Even so, I was spinning out of control and was eventually expelled from high school in the ninth grade for inappropriate behaviour consisting of smoking, vandalism and leaving the school grounds on the back of a motorbike. At fifteen I met a boy called Tony Wilson, fell pregnant to him at the ripe old age of sixteen and was married ten days after my seventeenth birthday. I guess that was one way to avoid ‘the belt’.

Surprisingly, my greatest ally at this time was Martin. From the beginning of my pregnancy, he began to soften towards me. At this time, he was working as a cabinetmaker and he couldn’t bear to see me sleeping on the floor, so he made me a queen-size waterbed from scratch. Dad, who had a furniture business at the time, supplied the materials. I felt very special. My daughter Crystal Charee was born at 4.34 pm on the 13th of November 1981 - Black Friday. My life changed from the moment I laid eyes on her. At last, I had found someone to love who would love me unconditionally. I calculated that I would only be thirty-five when she would turn eighteen. In those first glowing moments, I anticipated all the happy years ahead.

Mum, Grandpop, Tony and of course my brother were all smitten with this wonderful new life. The day Martin first met Crystal is a day I have never forgotten. As he held my tiny girl in his arms, he visibly softened and I think he fell deeply in love. The animosity that surrounded our teenage years dissolved and at last a warm friendship developed between us that I will always cherish. When I brought Crystal home, Martin became a constant visitor and actually made my couch his home. He would drive me crazy, drinking all my milk and eating all my food, but he was my brother and when he was driving me nuts, I would just picture him with Crystal the day she was born. He was very proud of her and would often bring his noisy mates home to visit his niece. The love was definitely a two-way thing. Crystal would quite often just stare at him with fascination. I think Martin had discovered in Crystal the same thing I had: unconditional love. We were still unsettled, Martin and I, but maybe it was never too late to teach an old dog new tricks.

Chapter 2

Loss: The Journey Begins

When I was 17 years old, I didn’t know what a medium was nor had I experienced grief. I was married, the mother of a four-month-old baby girl named Crystal Charee, and my future lay ahead of me as it does for any 17-year-old – full of big dreams and unlimited potential. Life had not been a bed of roses to this point, but on this fine day, April 2nd 1982, I was feeling very happy. Despite the trials and tribulations that face every new mother, my life was better than it had been for a long time and I had reasons to be optimistic.

My brother Martin had slept on the couch (again) and unfortunately had asthma when he awoke. For some reason, instead of our usual non-morning-people argument, I was feeling very loving toward Martin and even offered him my asthma puffer to take to work. Martin was excited about moving in with his girlfriend that day, asking me to look after her motorcycle helmet. He said he would be by that afternoon to collect it. I watched from the door as he rode off and for the first time ever, he turned around and waved. In that split second my mind took a photo which has never left me. Every detail remains intact.

Crystal and I were going shopping with my mother. As we got ready, the radio reported a fatal accident close by. I briefly wondered if it had involved anyone I knew, but quickly put the news out of my mind. We went shopping as planned and I bought Crystal her very first Easter chocolate egg. I couldn’t resist giving her the egg when we arrived back at mum’s and was laughing at her obvious enjoyment of this strange new treasure as we walked through the front door. My stepfather met me with a grim expression that wiped the smile right off my face. He told me to sit down and then broke the news. Martin had been killed instantly in a bike accident only 10km from his home. A car had failed to stop at the stop sign.

For the first time in my life, I experienced the devastating shockwave of tragic death. I know that I screamed and I will never forget the sheer panic, desperation and grief that I felt in that first minute. Every part of me was screaming ‘NO’ except one, that small part of me that knew it was true. It was like I had fallen into a nightmare – instant overwhelming agony on every level. That day, I wanted to crawl out of my own skin to escape the pain. I found myself watching a news report on the accident later in the evening. Funny how we tend to remember odd details of such moments. I remember noticing that Martin’s boots had landed in different positions on the road. Only the day or so beforehand, he had complained that they were too big. His bike, his pride and joy, was nothing but a chocolate-brown tangled mess. Also filmed at the scene was the ambulance that held the corpse of my brother. He was just 20 years old.

The days that followed were incredibly blurry. I could not open my eyes without the tears flowing like from a tap. My brother, my ‘real sibling’, my daughter’s adoring uncle, my childhood tormentor and friend was gone. Just like that. How often had I said to him when I was a child and knew no better, that I wished he were dead? I remembered quite clearly telling Martin that I was going to grow older than him. I think I was about eight at the time. It was a shock when I remembered those prophetic words after his death, and in my immaturity, I wondered if I had somehow contributed to his early demise by even uttering those words. I experienced a constant rollercoaster ride of denial, grief, tears, pain, guilt and anger. It was like trying to stand still in the surf. Every emotion just kept rushing at me over and over, like giant powerful breakers, and it was impossible to keep my footing. I felt helplessness beyond belief that nothing, not one thing in this world could fill the enormous hole that had just been torn open inside my heart. I had never been affectionate towards any of my relatives and now it was all too late. How could I tell him I loved him now? How could I tell him anything? Where was he? Was he safe? Could he hear me? Questions, questions and more questions formed in my mind, but there were no answers. The ‘whys’, the ‘if-onlys’ and the ‘buts’ just kept on coming, but there was nothing. Just grief - raw, painful and relentless. Every day when I opened my eyes, the rollercoaster revved up again.

Martin’s funeral was massive. There were people there that I had not seen since high school. There must have been about 300 people - maybe more, maybe less. It was hard to tell through the veil of tears. We decided to view the body, just to make sure in our minds that it was Martin we were saying goodbye to. It’s a cliché, but he did look very peaceful - quite serene in fact, with a strange Mona Lisa smile on his face. He was definitely not ‘there’ though. It was only his body we saw that day, and it hurt like hell. Still, those of us who were the closest to Martin got through the experience the best way they could. We all drank and smoked too much. We even dragged out the old ouija board, which had us convinced we had made contact. But still, we grieved. As the days and weeks passed, I wrote poetry and songs to try to express my feelings.

To My Brother

When they told me your brother’s dead,

I can’t remember what I said.

I remember thinking it can’t be true,

I remember how the sky was blue.

It doesn’t seem fair to take you away,

I know you didn’t have your way

All you wanted was to have fun and be free,

No one knew that this is how it would be.

I watched the news the night you died,

I saw your helmet, I saw your bike

I saw the ambulance in which you lay,

All I could do was cry and cry.

I am sorry for all the things I said,

I only wish it were me instead

And I wouldn’t have to feel this pain,

Of knowing I’ll never see you again.

Charmaine, April 1982

Hour after hour, day after day, week after week and year after year, the stream of questions remained unanswered. In 1982, mediums were not common in Australia. Looking back, Doris Stokes was perhaps the only famous one, but she was not well publicised and it just didn’t occur to any of us that there might be somebody out there who could provide the answers we so desperately needed. So we just grieved.

* * *

Two years later, I separated from Crystal’s father. Tony had been a fixture in my life for a long time – his wild and woolly blond hair and his nutty sense of humour had always melted my heart. We had made a beautiful daughter together and had tried to do what was expected of us as a young family, but Tony was a heavy drinker and in the end, I just couldn’t cope. I think the truth is we outgrew each other. When we separated, Tony went back to coastal New South Wales to live with his parents and I moved in with a friend.

I had full custody of Crystal, but I really did feel for Tony as I knew how much he adored his daughter. We wanted to be fair to each other, keeping what was best for Crystal as the first priority. After all, she loved us both and it wasn’t her fault that we couldn’t get on as a married couple. As she was only two and a half years old, we arranged to share as much time as possible with her between us, at least until she started school. We agreed that I would have her for two months and then she would spend one month with her father and grandparents in New South Wales. This arrangement worked quite well. My mother and I took turns calling Crystal on alternate days and sent lots of letters and postcards while she was there.