Lessons in Letting Go (3 page)

With all that freedom, I had no choice but to become a tyrant.

It was in Katie’s caravan that I finally pushed things too far. Katie’s younger brother had a best friend called Craig and often the four of us would play together. We had sleepovers in the caravan, all curled up in our sleeping bags, pretending we were in the outback or on the run from kidnappers. I loved that caravan so much that sometimes I would sneak out to it on my own. Entering it was like climbing into a magical wardrobe, or up a magical tree—normal rules didn’t exist in there. Maybe that’s why I chose it as the scene of my crime.

At the age of six, Craig was a slight and gentle boy. Once, yipped up on the freedom of Katie’s house, I had chased him around a piano until he collapsed. That’s the kind of thing I could do when I was there. In the same way animals flee to safer ground just before a natural disaster, Craig would often disappear whenever I came near. It just made me chase him harder.

Even though he was two years younger than me, I wanted to kiss Craig. Kissing a boy seemed like the most reckless thing I could do. (It still does.) How I was supposed to go about it, however, was a mystery to me. From what I had observed, girls did not do the kissing; we waited until a boy kissed us. That did not appeal to me at all as it left me open to random advances. The white-haired boy who had helped me when my parka zipper got stuck might turn out to be fine boyfriend material, but the boy who wet himself whenever he saw sawdust definitely would not. I couldn’t leave these things to chance and besides, Craig didn’t seem like he was going to kiss me of his own volition. If I wanted this to happen, I was going to have to do it myself. Like a lame gazelle wandering into lion territory, Craig never stood a chance.

Our first (and last) kiss was in Katie’s caravan. I had lured him there with the promise of showing him something. I had not thought through what the ‘something’ was but I had hoped that as soon as we got into the caravan it would come to me. Craig followed warily. As luck would have it, there was a Rod Stewart cassette near the tape player and I used that as my ruse. As Rod’s husky voice crooned out ‘Sailing’, I swung around, knocked Craig down onto the bed and planted one on his lips. He was too stunned to fight back.

It was not quite as romantic as I had imagined it would be. Mainly because, unbeknownst to me, he was eating a black jellybean and when I kissed him, he choked a little bit and black stuff oozed from his mouth. For one brief, confusing moment, I thought I had struck oil.

After that, I announced to everyone who would listen that Craig and I were boyfriend and girlfriend. Our lips had touched in a caravan and according to my books that meant we were practically married. As often happens with young love, however, our romance didn’t last long. In fact, it only lasted until he found out that I was telling everyone he was my boyfriend. In hindsight, I can see that it was never going to work. There was not only the age difference to contend with, but we also wanted different things out of life. I was into My Little Pony, he liked Skeletor, I wanted to grow up to be an aerobics instructor, he wanted to eat Clag. Also, if I had stopped to think about it at the time, I would have realised he was just not ready for a serious, committed relationship. Probably because he was six.

It was an ugly break-up. I didn’t know back then that it was best to walk away from these things, to saunter off with your head held high and your dignity intact. I was eight, I lacked subtlety, diplomacy and consideration. I lacked restraint. I called Craig a poo breath. He called me a bag of sick-up. I called him a blood blister. He called me a wart face. I called him a virgin. Being called a virgin should not have caused offence to a six-year-old—in fact, it should have been considered a good thing—but at that age when you don’t know what a word means, you assume the worst. I called him a virgin, he cried and that was the last I saw of him. I didn’t care, he had spurned me; disappearing was the least he could do. Unlike the little Waltons girl, Craig deserved all he got.

I didn’t see him again until many years later, when we were both adults. It was at a birthday party in Melbourne and I recognised him immediately. He was unmistakably Craig; he looked exactly the same except taller and less frightened. I hesitated, worried that he might not remember me or, worse, that he would. Eventually, curiosity got the better of me and I gulped down a glass of champagne and went over. I tapped him lightly on the shoulder and as he turned he grinned, then immediately reminded me of the time I had accosted him in a caravan. Then he told me he was gay.

Even though I knew it was illogical, a small voice in the back of my head whispered, ‘You turned Craig gay.’

As Craig laughingly recounted every gory detail of that caravan assault, I thought back to the little Waltons girl and inwardly marvelled at my idiocy. You spend your life trying to make up for a crime you think you’ve committed and, in the end, it turns out you’re guilty of something else entirely.

Chapter Three

I had moved to Melbourne a few years before my reunion with Craig, leaving my childhood behind, hidden in cupboards, wardrobes and drawers. Coming from such a small country town, it took the entire length of my university degree to settle in and, needless to say, when I first arrived my terror was so intense that I was virtually vibrating. There were more people in my art history class than had been in my entire high school.

I had spent a year in Albury–Wodonga before moving to Melbourne, trying to acclimatise to living away from home. I had loved it. Now that I was almost a grown-up, Albury–Wodonga was the perfect size for a country girl spreading her wings. I had thrived there. I’d made new friends, I’d been invited to parties, I’d even kissed a couple of boys without having to concuss them first or lock them in caravans. But Melbourne was different. Melbourne was unfathomably huge. I regressed instantly.

I spent my first year going straight to class then scurrying back to my dorm, where I would eat ice-cream from the bucket and listen to old-time radio because it reminded me of home. I was too scared to find a new hairdresser, so I let my permed hair grow out until the straight part reached my ears and the bottom half remained curly. (I looked like a cocker spaniel.)

I wandered around in a pair of purple leggings and a hand-knitted jumper and I was always surprised when people figured out I was from the country without my even mentioning it. It seemed that I was destined to never fit into the city.

Maybe this was the way it was always going to be, I thought. After all, I’d been in Melbourne on my own once before and things had not gone well that time either.

I had been fifteen and had wangled my way into doing work experience at a city radio station. Luckily, I had a second cousin who lived nearby and I was going to stay with him and his family. It should have been a chance to learn about the world and gain some desperately needed experience about living in it. Instead, I arrived at my cousin’s house with only one goal for the entire week: to make sure that no one realised I was from the country.

My biggest problem was my country accent. I often replaced the word ‘yes’ with a sharp intake of breath. It was a habit I had picked up from my grandmother and her friends. If you agreed with someone and words seemed like too much of an effort, you simply gasped instead. If you strongly agreed, you might gasp twice in rapid succession. To the unaccustomed ear we probably sounded like we were choking. I had nightmares that if anyone in the city heard me doing this, they would point at me and start yelling, ‘Cow rooter!’ I practised saying ‘yeah’ and ‘cool’ and ‘yeah, cool’ and ‘cool, yeah’ under my breath for a whole week before I left.

My second problem was wardrobe. (My mother had already refused to buy me a power suit like the ones Melanie Griffith wore in the movies.) I fossicked through my wardrobe and dragged out what I thought was my most cosmopolitan outfit. I started with a pair of grey, stretch-flannel culottes: a pair of pants so wide-legged that when you were standing with your legs together they looked like a skirt. Then, for reasons only my fifteen-year-old brain could possibly justify, I chose to team them with a hand-knitted jumper with a picture of a clown on the front. Looking back on it now, I doubt they even dressed Special Needs kids like that.

I wore this ensemble to my first day of work experience. I was very nervous. I had arrived at my cousin’s house the night before and things had got off to a bad start. Wanting to prove what a worthy addition to their household I was going to be, I threw myself headlong into playing with my cousin’s seven-year-old daughter. We both played with her dolls, she showed me her sticker collection, we danced to her favourite cassette tape. We were getting along very well until I knocked out her front tooth. I still have a photo of this silken-haired little girl in a ruffled denim skirt and blue top, riding the stuffed horse that moments later I tripped over, sending it and her halfway across the room. Even then she probably would have landed unscathed if her face had not glanced off my elbow. I found the tooth underneath the coffee table, half buried in the shag pile. At least we had something to give the Tooth Fairy.

The next morning, with mercurochrome covering the tooth-shaped divot in my elbow, I was standing at the entrance to a shopping centre the size of my entire town, somewhere in the middle of which was the radio station where I would be working. I set my face in what I hoped looked like a world-weary, urbanite expression and walked through its automatic doors.

City people take it for granted but for country kids, coming to the city for the first time is quite overwhelming. There are all the buildings, the traffic and the people speaking in complete sentences to contend with, not to mention the loose-toothed children. These people working at their fancy easy-listening radio station probably all drove Porsches and spoke in nothing but rapid-fire wisecracks. They probably all had share portfolios and lived in condos. They probably hung out with famous people like Boz Scaggs.

I was going to be spending my week with the station’s copywriter. It was the closest thing to show business I thought I could handle. I had not dared to apply for anything to do with actual performing; the idea of real actors and directors flipped my heart right over. I reasoned I would start in the background so that if I made a mess of it, I did not have as far to fall, and if I somehow managed to do all right, I wasn’t over-reaching myself. Some people are frightened of failure, others of success. I was frightened of both.

I had my head down, concentrating hard on walking properly in my one-inch heels, so it was not until I was well inside the shopping centre that I noticed the escalator. I faltered. We didn’t have escalators in the country. We had stories about escalators though: stories about people getting minced by them. I looked around nervously for an elevator. The radio station was one floor down. Everyone I knew back home was well aware of the fact that if you did not jump off an escalator in time, you would get sucked into the grate at the bottom, go all the way around inside the machine and come back out the top looking like coleslaw. Hundreds of people had been injured on escalators, including, I had heard, a girl who had been scalped. Or something like that. Maybe she just caught her hair a little bit. Either way, it was a close call and not a story whose veracity I wanted to test with my own head.

I was starting to perspire by this time. I stared down at the escalator, desperate. If the clown on my jumper had been able to move, it would now have been doing an impression of Munch’s
The Scream
. I had to do this, I thought to myself. Nothing was going to expose me as a country bumpkin more than running away from fancy stair technology. I looked down again and forced myself to walk onto it. It was then I realised the escalator wasn’t moving. It was just sitting there, its vicious teenager-chewing teeth motionless. Even I could figure out that a stationary escalator was essentially the same as stairs, and stairs were something I was familiar with. Stairs I could do. My confidence returned. I was going to do this, I was really going to do this! I was going to walk down an escalator like it was something I did every day and then I was going to waltz into my first day of work experience, crack some terribly witty gag about technology and everyone would think I was so cool they’d invite me to a disco.

I started walking down, thinking to myself, ‘I’m fitting in, look at me fitting in!’ I looked up to see if other people were noticing me, heedless of the need to watch where I was going and heedless of the fact that I was wearing what were about to become death-trousers. The culotte is a wide-legged pant, and not an article of clothing made for young women with coordination issues and a slightly scatterbrained approach to walking. As I gaily skipped down the non-moving escalator, the heel of one little shoe got caught in the cuff of the other little trouser leg and I tripped. I managed to grab hold of the handrail, saving myself from smashing headfirst into the steps, but my feet were gone from underneath me. I fell down the rest of the escalator. Or, more correctly, I half slid, half fell as I held onto the railing the whole way, making a loud squeaking noise as the rubber and the skin of my wrist fought a battle to see who could handle friction best. The rubber won.

Not surprisingly I caused quite a scene. As I lay on the shopping centre floor a few feet from the escalator, staring at the ceiling two floors above me, with rubber burns on one wrist and bleeding from one ankle, a security guard ran over. He knelt beside me and asked if I was all right. My stockings were in tatters, my woolly, clowny friend was skewed around my little flat chest and all the fight had gone out of me. Everything I had been working so hard to conceal sprang back to the surface and I uttered the first words that came into my head.

‘I’m from the country.’

No one invited me to a disco that night, although they did let me pop out to buy a new pair of stockings to replace the ones shredded by the escalator. They also gave me some Bandaids.

Now, just a few years later and living in Melbourne permanently, the trauma of that incident was still fresh in my mind. Thank god I went to a university that didn’t have escalators. And thank god I still had that clown jumper with me. I didn’t wear it anymore, of course, but I’d brought it down to Melbourne as a keepsake. With everyone else so far away, the bits and pieces I’d brought from home were the only things that kept me company: that clown jumper knew what I had been through; it was my friend.