BY THE AGE OF THIRTEEN, HIGH SCHOOL IS A HYBRID OF HIGH marks and experimentation: study on the weekdays, alcohol and drugs on the weekends. All the bad behaviour happens at my place, the only house my friends can come for sleepovers then sneak out to beach bonfires.
It’s a chilly Saturday night, but I’m wearing a short skirt and singlet top with kitten heels and hoop earrings. I cover up with my trusty long black trenchcoat, bringing it in at the waist with a belt. I grab a duffle bag and head out. ‘Bye, Dad, I’m going to the ice-cream parlour. Then I’m staying at Zarn’s house.’
Dad hands me twenty dollars.
Down at the roundhouse on Scarborough Beach, bottles of Southern Comfort and tequila are already being passed around when I join the circle. We splinter off, collecting sticks as firewood. Sand moulds to our backsides and beers, and a boy called Josh runs into the ocean. We lose sight of him and run screaming his name down to the shoreline. Our feet are wet, and Josh emerges soaking and exhilarated, running circles along the tide’s edge with his arms outstretched. ‘Woo-hoo!’ he cries. We laugh, and the night wears on into drunken deep and meaningfuls that turn into awkward pashes. The days that follow are always a map of teenage heartache for me and my schoolfriends to pore over in the library and at lunch.
Friends are my life rafts. When I’m not with them, I write a diary. It begins as a bit of fun, decorating pages with doodles and poems, but eventually it turns into full-scale typical teenage angst. Then something else altogether, something dark. On some pages I’m brutally candid, and on others I outright lie, even to myself. If I die tomorrow, I want to impress the reader with a normal, perhaps even enviable teenage life, so I write about crushes and parties to keep things light. But then all of a sudden my real feelings break through.
One afternoon, I come home from school, throw my backpack on my neatly made bed, and then I see it: my diary is wide open on a page describing an intimate moment, and on the opposite page I’ve scrawled, I hate Angela. My stepmother has found my book of innermost thoughts, the pages where I rewrite and try to make sense of my life in order to save it. There’s a cigarette and matches on top of the open diary – Angela is letting me know she found those too.
I call my best friend, Fee, looping the spiral cord of my pink phone around my hand. After a minute or two we both hear a click, indicating that whoever has been listening in as usual has hung up. We lower our voices. I had intended to have a whinge about my stepmother, but Fee is crying. She’s hiding under a desk. This happens sometimes – Fee’s dad on a rampage. She’s frightened and I try to comfort her but then he storms in and rips the phone away and all I hear is ‘Please, Dad’ before the line goes dead. Fee hides her bruises and the police are never called, no matter how heavy handed he is with them all. Whenever I suggest that I will call them, Fee is horrified. When I hug her inside the school gates, we have a knowing between us that no galaxy of words can begin to express.
When I complain to Dad that Angela has been going through my things, he says it doesn’t matter, ‘she can do what she likes’. And with that, whatever little corner of the universe I felt was mine, instantly isn’t.
Then one day Dad catches me smoking and strikes me so hard across the face I fall backwards down the stairs, just managing to catch myself on the rail. So I run away to Paw Paw and Granddad’s place, just like Mum always did, and stand in front of the mirror, hitting myself in the face with the hairspray can in the hope the bruising will be so deep I won’t ever be sent back. As I stare at my reflection in the bathroom mirror I wonder when it’ll be my turn, when the Kwa madness will strike or, worse still, whatever illness my mum has. The girl in the looking-glass gazes back at me with tears in her eyes.
When things get tough I head to the beach. Louis Johnson and I spend hours locked in philosophical discussions while we sit on a wall overlooking the surf. We aren’t remarkably close, but we are friends.
One night, years later, Louis is bashed by four people on his birthday. He’s heading home from a party on a train when they lay into him with fists and boots, dragging him onto a road where one of them runs him over with a car. A passing cyclist calls triple zero, and an ambulance officer takes Louis home to ‘sleep it off’. But Louis is dead by morning. The killers are caught, one telling police he only wanted to break Louis’s legs and that he drove into Louis ‘because he was black’. The ambulance officer tells police he thought Louis was ‘drunk and high from glue or petrol sniffing’. His death will become a significant case, and one day there will be scholarships in Louis Johnson’s name.
But for now, in the moment, life is simple: Louis and I just sit and talk and look out at the sea.