Call Me Cruel Read Online Free

include . . . tennis rackets, cricket bats and there was even a threat with a knife.’ He sentenced McCann, who had pleaded guilty at the last minute, to nine months’ periodic detention.
    Despite the assaults listed above, and all the others, Carol continued to live with McCann through the second half of the 1990s. After every attack she told herself, ‘I’ve got over this hurdle,’ and hoped things would get better. This is quite common with domestic violence, where victims often return to their abusers a number of times before leaving for good. Things didn’t get better for Carol, whom McCann continued to hit and abuse and belittle and isolate.
    She decided to withhold a small amount of her wages from him and put it in a bank account. One night he went through her bag and found the bank book. This started a massive argument, and he bashed her and grabbed a knife and stabbed her. Then he threw her out of the house and onto a marble walkway and slammed the door. There was blood everywhere and Carol had several broken ribs. Somehow she managed to get up and started to walk towards her mother’s place, but before long she collapsed on the footpath. There she was found at 2.00 a.m. by Kylie, who had been out and was walking home. She helped Carol to Louisa’s and called a doctor. He wanted her to have McCann charged with assault but she refused. Carol says Kylie went back to her place with an iron bar but McCann refused to open the door. Kylie sought psychiatric help after this incident: she wanted to kill both her stepfather and herself.
    Carol was taken up to her sister Joy’s place at Green Point north of Sydney, a region known as the Central Coast or, to locals, simply as the Coast. But once she’d recovered, she went back to McCann. He still had total control over her and kept her as isolated as possible from other people, always wanting to know where she was, checking the grocery dockets to see how much she’d spent. The violence became even more frequent. Finally, on 30 July 1998, it came to a head. They were at the club in the evening and he asked her for more money to put through the machines. She told him he couldn’t have any and left the club by herself. He followed her out in a fury and attacked her on the street, bashing and kicking.
    Kylie actually witnessed some of this assault. She was driving past in a friend’s car and saw McCann hit Carol in the face. ‘That was my mother,’ Kylie said to the driver.
    â€˜Are you sure?’
    â€˜I think I know my own mother! Turn around and go to the police station!’
    When they arrived, Kylie ran inside and said, ‘My mum is being bashed on the corner.’ Two police raced to the scene and spoke with the couple. When Kylie later saw Carol, she had a lot of blood on her face and clothes, and cuts to her nose and lip, a swollen right eye and cheek, and grazes and abrasions on her left elbow and her hands.
    Carol was taken to Bankstown Hospital, where she spent three weeks and had part of her face rebuilt. She describes this as a turning point in her life. An apprehended violence order was taken out on McCann, and after Carol was released from hospital she spent three months in a refuge, away from Sydney so he couldn’t find her. She decided to move to the Coast, where her mother now lived at Erina. The night of the attack was the last time she saw McCann, apart from when she went to court to give evidence against him a few years later.
    Kylie had one more encounter with her stepfather. Her relationship with Troy Myers had ended, and when she was eighteen she began going out with Dean Lucan, a young bartender at the Regents Park Bowling Club. He was a quiet man, a champion at lawn bowls, and Kylie started to play too. They lived together in a flat in Auburn and things seemed to be going well. The family say Dean was a calm young man and had a calming effect on Kylie while they were