This account was received by post, handwritten, with no return address and a Toowoomba postmark. The contributor asked for her name to be withheld “because of my daughter’s practice”. We have respected this. Where the handwriting could not be read, we have said so.
I have never told anyone this, not my husband, who was away at the time, not my mother, who would have had Views, and not my daughter, who is the subject of it, and who is thirty-five now and has her own practice on Margaret Street and does not need this. But I read Mrs Mangan’s piece and I thought, well, if she can say it, so can I. So.
July 1989
My husband was in Moranbah on a six-week swing. I was in the house on my own, on the range, up near the escarpment. It was cold, properly cold, Toowoomba cold, and I had the electric blanket on and the little radio going for company.
I woke at about three. The radio had gone to static. The room was full of light.
Not blue, which I know is what everyone says. White. Warm white, like the inside of a lampshade. And it was not coming from anywhere. There was no source. The whole room was just lit, every corner, under the bed, inside the wardrobe, which was shut, I could see through the door of the wardrobe to the light inside it. I have never been able to explain that and I’ve stopped trying.
I was not frightened. I want to say that clearly because it’s the part people don’t believe. I felt looked after. I felt the way you feel when you’re little and you’re sick and someone’s sitting on the end of the bed.
There was nobody there. No beings, no Greys, none of Mrs Mangan’s Gary. Just the light, and a feeling of enormous attention, as if the light was considering me. And then, and this is the part that’s hard to write, the light got, for want of a better word, closer. It didn’t move. It was already everywhere. It just became more about me.
I will leave it there. Warren has said this is a family website and I have a daughter.
It was over by about half past three. The radio came back on in the middle of a song. I went back to sleep, which I know sounds impossible, but I did, and I slept better than I had in years.
What followed
Six weeks later I knew. Eleven weeks later a doctor in town confirmed it. My husband, when he got home, was delighted, and did the sums, and the sums more or less worked if you were generous about the weekend before he left, and I was generous, and I have been generous for thirty-five years.
She was born the following April. Eight pounds two. Perfectly ordinary, the midwife said, lovely colour, and she was, she is, and I knew. A mother knows. She looked at me from the very first minute like she was considering me.
My daughter
I will tell you the things I noticed, and you can make of them what you like.
She was never afraid of the dark. Never, not once, not even as a toddler. She’d ask me to turn the light off.
She could find anything. Keys, the remote, the dog. She’d just walk to it.
She has the steadiest hands of anyone I’ve ever met. She could thread a needle at four. She did my ear piercings at fourteen with a sewing needle and an ice cube and they’re the straightest piercings I’ve ever had, and I’ve had them done professionally since.
She is a dental hygienist. She has her own practice, two chairs, a girl on reception. She is, and I’ve had the hygiene done by her, very good with her hands. Patients come from Dalby. Patients come from Warwick. She told me once that she can tell what’s wrong in a mouth before she’s looked, that she just gets a feeling, and I said that’s lovely darling, and I went and sat in the car for a bit.
Draw your own conclusions. I’ve drawn mine. I’ve drawn them every time she’s looked at me across the Christmas table with those steady eyes and said “Mum, you’ve got something in your top left, come in Tuesday.”
Why now
I’m sixty-eight. My husband passed in 2012. He never knew, and he loved her, and she loved him, and the sums worked, and that’s the end of that part.
But I’d like someone to know. I’d like it on a record somewhere, even one in a second bedroom in Wandoona, that on a cold night in 1989 a light came into a house on the range and was kind to me and left me with the best thing in my life. I don’t know what it was. I don’t know what it wanted. I don’t think it wanted anything, really. I think it was just passing, and it looked in, and it thought: her.
If you print this, don’t print the street. And don’t print the practice. And if any of you have got anything in your top left, she’s very reasonable, and she’ll know before you sit down.
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Warren notes: the Collective is aware this is the only account on file in which the visitor was polite. We have asked Mrs Mangan to raise it with Gary.
Document U8MC-15-0307. Status: UNVERIFIED BUT TRUE. This file is retained indefinitely, or until the Men in Beige ask for it, whichever is never.