GAIL BELL Being Shot: A place between worlds. Reviewed by Ashley Kalagian Blunt

The victim of a random unsolved shooting, in this memoir Gail Bell offers a sober contemplation of the ramifications of gun violence.

As 17-year-old Gail Bell walked home from the train station at Toongabbie, New South Wales, on a dark night in April 1968, a vehicle approached on the street behind her. From inside the car, the driver took aim and shot Bell in the back. It became a nationwide media story. As Bell describes it:

There was nothing special about me, other than my youth and misfortune on that night … And yet, there seemed to be a strong appetite for ongoing reports about a girl from an out-of-the-way town who had walked into darkness and been shot.

She attributes this to what was, in 1968, ‘a new and troubling sense that random danger was abroad in a suburban street close to you. That message is well understood in 2018.’

Surgeons at the time decided to leave the bullet where it had lodged among Bell’s internal organs. Removing it would be riskier than leaving it in place, they said. The solid lead bullet resulted in lead poisoning, and a different surgeon removed it five years later. Bell brought the bullet home in a glass bottle. The psychological damage she suffered, which led to anxiety and panic attacks, couldn’t be so neatly extracted.

Being Shot is Bell’s personal exploration of the short- and long-term effects experienced by victims of gun violence. Her debut book, The Poison Principle, won the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award in 2002 and traces the story of her grandfather, who poisoned two of his sons, and the consequences for the family. In this, her second book, she grapples with her own trauma to consider what tragedy has to teach us and what we can learn from survivors of violence.

Blending memoir with journalism, Bell examines her own experiences, alongside those of a number of other shooting victims, to consider both the physical and psychological aftermath. She also interviews recreational gun owners, war veterans, and police and RSPCA officers who use weapons in their work. In an effort to understand the appeal of guns, she considers their 500-year history and current prevalence in pop culture. Reluctantly learning to handle a variety of guns while visiting a shooting range, she finds the .22 bolt-action rifle ‘strangely seductive’. Watching Thelma and Louise is likewise revealing:

It was strange, I mused, how the dynamic altered when a woman’s finger was on the trigger, how I, a gun-avoider and deplorer of the prominence of guns in popular culture, felt the faint shiver of Western gun mystique play over my skin.

Bell’s shooter was never caught. After serial killer Ivan Milat’s arrest in 1994, Bell learned he’d been known to shoot guns from within his car near where she lived during the 1960s, and so could have been responsible for her shooting. More alarming to her is the discovery that a young woman had been murdered one month before Bell was shot, also not far from her home. She becomes obsessed with the murder during the trial, which takes place decades later. For the first time, she convinces herself she has stumbled upon the man who shot her.

But when she speaks to a detective involved in the case, he convinces her the accused man was not likely to have been her shooter. Readers are left with the same lack of resolution Bell has lived with for 50 years.

One reason her case remains unsolved may have been that the detective responsible for finding the culprit instead treated Bell as a suspect. She recalls him coming to her hospital room when she had sufficiently recovered and settling into a chair, saying:

‘Today I’m going to sit here until you tell me who did it. It’s as simple as that. I’m not moving until you stop playing games.’

Perhaps, Bell speculates, the detective thought of her as cheap, with her dyed hair and heavy make-up, and that, by choosing to walk home alone after dark, she was ‘asking for trouble’.

In the years following the shooting, Bell learned to deal with what she later understood to be post-traumatic stress through a mix of stoic resolve and pharmaceutical support, particularly Valium. This approach treated her symptoms, but did nothing to address the underlying trauma. As the years went on, Bell realised that she avoided telling her story. The single shot in the dark felt ‘tame’ compared to many others’ experiences, like those of Vietnam war veterans and survivors of the Port Arthur massacre. When she tried to verbally narrate her experience, she also found:

The rambling sentence-by-sentence unfolding of your story will almost always fail to raise your audience to rapt attention, and more importantly, to rapt engagement with your central issues. It’s taken me thirty years to know what my central issues are. I have never found them in a social setting. 

Instead, Bell began to explore her trauma through writing, which gave her the thinking space to work through the narrative of her shooting and the effects it had on her life. Though this process took years, she found it more effective than counselling.

Being Shot is a sober contemplation of the repercussions of gun violence on individuals. Bell acknowledges the challenge of guns in a society where not everyone manages ‘a realistic grip on good citizenship’. Despite this, she offers optimism, both in the insights from our advancing understanding of PTSD, as well as the coping strategies she developed through difficult years.

Gail Bell Being Shot: A place between worlds Brio 2018 PB 288pp $26.99 (First published in 2003 as Shot.)

Ashley Kalagian Blunt has written for Griffith Review, Kill Your Darlings and the Sydney Review of Books. Her memoir Full of Donkey: Travels in Armenia was shortlisted for the 2017 Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript Award. Visit her website and follow her on Twitter: @AKalagianBlunt.

You can buy Being Shot: a place between worlds from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here.

To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.

Tags: Australian women's writing, Gail | Bell, gun crime, memoir, post-traumatic stress, The Poison Principle, victims of crime