One Way or Another (6 page)

‘You were stoned.'

‘It wasn't just that. I wasn't stoned the first time. There's some mystical connection between us.'

‘You're hormonal and mad.' She shook her head. ‘Trust me. We'll scam some money. You go down next weekend and in half an hour you'll be all fixed up and next time this guy's in town you can screw him senseless again.' She patted me maternally on the knee. ‘Only this time, you'll be on the pill. Agreed?'

I knew I had to be sensible.

‘Agreed.'

There was a pause while we sat, almost in prayer. The ants ran up the white trunk of the ghost gum and an Ibis ran from behind the tree.

‘We'll have a raffle. We'll raise the money with a raffle.'

I laughed for the first time in a week.

*

I thought she'd been joking but within a week, she'd raised the funds I needed and I'd made an appointment with a small private clinic south of the border. The kids who bought raffle tickets were told they'd go into a draw to win ‘Three Completed Top-quality Assignments in Subjects of Your Choice', and that they were helping to fund a top-secret mission Sam and I were on. They probably figured we wanted to buy drugs or a new wardrobe or some such thing. It seemed a fair exchange to them.

Against Sam's advice, I did what I could to contact the Impregnating Poet. I rang his management office and left a message for him to call me. The woman I spoke to was not pleasant enough to be called polite. She took my name and number but I could almost hear her crumple it up and slam-dunk it into the waste-paper bin before she hung up. I did manage to learn that he was ‘somewhere in the UK'. She asked me not to call that number again.

With pain, I realised this was my problem alone. There was no relationship. We had no ‘future'. It was time to cut my losses and deal with the hand I had been given.

*

My appointment was for Friday morning. I had never been able to play truant from school because my father was on staff, but as luck would have it he was in Brisbane at a professional development seminar for the whole week. Someone in the other world was looking after me. Elvis? John Lennon? I listened to
Double Fantasy
, Lennon's final album, a lot that week.

Disaster struck on Wednesday. Early in the morning, Sam rang, very upset, and explained that a death in the family meant she and her mother were flying to Sydney for a week. Could I really go through this alone? Sam suggested I ask another friend to come, but I wanted no-one else. Okay, not true. I wanted the Poet beside me. I shut my eyes, called upon all my strength and assured her I would be fine. I put the phone down and squeezed my hands together. I'd never understood what it meant to ‘wring one's hands with worry' until then.

Friday morning came. I had lain awake all night, listening to the fruit bats nibbling the date tree outside my bedroom window. They would squeak and scratch and every now and then a date would hit the ground with a thud. Thirty-nine fell that night. I felt like a five-year-old on Christmas Eve or a condemned prisoner on death row, excited and afraid but craving release from my misery. I was scared to sleep for fear of dreaming of a happy future with my Poet and 2.3 little poets, a white sedan and a well- behaved golden retriever.

At 5.06 a.m. sunlight finally shone though the crack between the curtains. I had packed my schoolbag with a change of clothes and the sanitary napkins the clinic nurse had told me to bring. I had smuggled two Panadol tablets from the medicine cabinet. The nurse had suggested I might need them, as pain relief was not included in the price of the procedure.

I caught the bus from the corner opposite the shops, as I did whenever Dad was not giving me a lift. But as we turned left at the chicken shop at the end of Monaco Street I got off, telling the driver I'd left an important assignment at home. He shrugged. He didn't give a crap. I was over-informing out of para-noia. I changed in the public toilets at the service station and sat waiting for the bus to Tweed Heads, hoping no-one who knew my mother drove past.

The journey was slow, an endless staccato of stops and starts, and I kept checking the watch Mum had given me for my seventeenth birthday. I could have sworn the second hand stopped whenever I looked away.

Finally we were in New South Wales. After a long, hot walk from the bus stop I arrived opposite the clinic, a pale-blue building. Crossing the road I walked straight into a group of three people – two women and a man – unpacking signs. I stared at the words and felt a cold wave of dread pass over me. Guilt washed the colour from my face and I tried to shake it off but it was too late. They had seen. I moved away, mumbling an apology, but one of the women grabbed my wrist.

‘You have other options, sweetheart. If you'll give us just a couple of minutes …'

The man pulled a little plastic thing from his pocket and held it up in front of my face. It looked like the Hang Ten surf-gear logo. It was a pair of skin-coloured feet.

‘Your baby has feet this size or bigger.' He did not sound as friendly as the woman. ‘You look far too nice to be a murderer.' His eyes blazed and his pate shone and I stared at him, unable to craft words of rebuttal.

‘I'm sorry.' I made for the clinic.

‘Does your mother know you're here?' a woman's angry voice called from behind me but I did not look back.

‘Jesus loves you,' the man shouted. His voice was full of hate. I shut my eyes, took a deep breath and turned to face them.

‘If Jesus loves me now, he'll still love me when I come out of here.'

I blocked out their sudden singing and hurried through the heavy frosted-glass doors. The air conditioning seemed too cold and I walked across to the receptionist, conscious of the squeak my school shoes made on the floor. There was no-one at all in the waiting area, to my relief.

The brunette at the desk was as efficient as Pine-o-Clean and gave me a refreshing smile. With hyperactive friendliness she took my details and asked me to pay up-front. The price I'd been quoted over the phone did not include a general anaesthetic, she explained, just a light local anaesthetic. She gave me a receipt, took down my Medibank number, assured me it would all be confidential and asked me to take a seat.

Not two minutes later another emphatically positive woman appeared and called me by my first name. We retired to her comfortable office. After a little small talk she got down to more serious business.

‘Are you in a relationship with the father?'

‘I don't know ... he's in England or somewhere like that. He's a bit ... quite a bit older than me and it ... I've only been with him a couple of times ...' I blushed, never having spoken to an adult woman about my active sex life.

‘Have you discussed this with your parents or a teacher or someone who can support you after the procedure?'

‘There's Sam. She's my best friend. She was going to be here but something came up …' I shrugged and gave a pained smile. ‘My parents would kill me. Literally.'

‘What would upset them more? The fact that you are having sex or the fact that you have decided to have a termination?'

‘Both ... I don't know. Yeah, both, I suppose. They're Catholic.'

‘If you had to give me your primary reason for making this choice today, what would it be?'

How to narrow it down to just one? I measured my answer and tried to put my many reasons into some kind of order.

‘Well, I'm too young and I don't think the father would be ... around for me very much and I don't have family support for something like this and … I want to do something with my life. I've got nothing to give a baby and that just wouldn't be fair. If I do this, I can still have a life. If I had a baby now, I think ... really ... I'd be wrecking two lives.'

Not long later, after an examination by a doctor and a blood test, I was dressed in a white smock open at the back, lying on a hard examination table. I'd been given a Valium tablet and felt a little light-headed. From outside I could hear muffled voices and my legs quivered with goosebumps. I was having crazy thoughts: What if there is a God and he is going to be seriously pissed off with me now? What if I bleed to death? What if ... if ... if?

The doctor strode in, dressed in pale-blue scrubs, and a nurse followed. She too wore a cheesy grin and I wondered if it was compulsory for the female staff.

‘Okay, then,' the doctor began. ‘Sherilyn here will explain the procedure as we go so you understand what you are feeling and why. Are we all set? We'll take about fifteen minutes.'

My legs were placed into uncomfortable stirrups and I felt like a dartboard as Dr Whatshisname aimed his syringe and Sherilyn gave me a running commentary. First came the local anaesthetic to the cervix. It was like no pain I'd ever felt. I can only liken it to having a red-hot needle pushed though your eyeball, slowly. The rest of the ordeal was just as bad and felt more like an hour than fifteen minutes. The sound of a suction device made my skin crawl and nausea hit me like a tsunami. Cramping and stinging and feeling like a piece of meat being carved up in a butcher's shop, I clenched my teeth and swore off sex for life. Half an hour later I was bleeding into a pad, sipping a hot cup of tea and forcing down a chocolate biscuit. I'd swallowed my Panadol and tried to focus on a
New Idea
magazine, to little avail.

An hour later I was on the bus home. I'd been shunned by the pro-lifers out the front on my way out. I was beyond salvation by that stage, I suppose – a condemned murderer. Finally the coast road's shabby shops, fibro shacks and used-car yards made way for the more cosmopolitan ugliness of the Gold Coast and I was back at the corner of Monaco Street, being accosted by a man in a chicken suit offering two cooked chooks for the price of one. I changed back into my uniform at the servo and as I headed out of the car park Chicken Man called after me, ‘Who's been a naughty girl, then? What was more fun than school, eh?'

I wanted to yell back, ‘An abortion, you stupid chicken-shit arsehole!' but I just kept walking. I was tired. I was sore. I wanted to go to sleep for a very long time. My upper thighs felt like they were turning inside out and my womb was weeping painfully. I imagined this was something like what it felt like to be pack-raped. My feelings for the Poet had quite suddenly soured.

I slept and slept. Dreamless unconsciousness. Shuffling through school days like an automaton, I spent lunchtimes in the library, trying in vain to study for the end of semester exams. Sam said she was worried about me. I told her not to bother. The emotional slump demanded peace and solitude.

The Tweed Heads ordeal had been a wake-up call. I was not playing some silly party game like Pin the Tail on the Rock God. My parents' Catholicism was not the root of my anguish. It was the fear that I had acted rashly and hormonally without properly thinking things through. I had made the only responsible choice, I repeated to myself often. But there was something so sad and disappointing about my first brush with motherhood.

Don't look back. You should never look back. Yet I kept looking over my shoulder, wallowing in what might have been. What would I have called a child? Something wild, like ‘Ramone', or sensible, like ‘Sarah'? Would he or she have had my freckles and frizzy hair or the Poet's brown eyes and lanky intensity? Had I told him, would he have gone down on bended knee and offered me a lifetime of loyalty and love? Had I told my parents, might they have understood and supported me? I began to fear that I had, perhaps, jumped the gun. Maybe there had been other options. Lamenting my position, I flipped through countless tomes on the ethics of life and death. I tried to make peace with myself but the harder I sought it the more elusive it became.

The doctor at the clinic had given me a prescription for the contraceptive pill and I swallowed it dutifully each morning. The pack was wedged deep inside my mattress, deposited through a small cut made with a kitchen knife. Although I swore I'd never have sex again, I still dreamed longing, lusty dreams about the Poet. When
Countdown
magazine ran an exclusive interview with him I let my fingers trace his handsome face on the glossy paper. He looked straight through me and I wondered if he'd given me the same generic sultry look he gave to the camera. Had he had sex with me the way another star might give an autograph? The more I analysed my two Poetic adventures, the lower my self-esteem sank. An inner voice taunted that I was about as meaningful to the Poet as a used condom – useful for a time but then distasteful, good for nothing but the rubbish bin. I began to hate him with a strange intensity, laced with passion and desire and deep, cancerous pain.

By the July school holidays, an uneasy anaesthesia had settled upon me. Nothing felt good anymore. There was nothing to look forward to or hope for. Sleep was my only escape and yet I would wake in the silence of the early morning and stare at nothing for hours on end. Once my sleepless hours had been filled with fantasies about sex, travel and fame. Now I spent them wading through brain fog.

Tiny sores like mosquito bites had appeared on my arms and legs and I picked at them relentlessly, digging at my flesh until they became infected and puss-filled. I stopped teasing my hair and walked with the hunched shoulders of a chronic asthmatic. Acne decorated my face and my eyes were hemmed with red. The smallest thing would bring on tears – a snap from my mother, a sigh from my father, a jibe from my sister or a concerned question from friends, all of whom I tried to hide from. Food bored me and I began sneaking cigarettes from my parents and smoking them behind the house when they were out. I detested smoking but I detested not smoking more. I moped about, showering only when it became absolutely necessary and picking at dry toast instead of real food. I think my parents assumed it was all some histrionic teenage nonsense.

I tried to slice through my numbness by cutting myself deeply. A dull sensation radiated up my arm and I watched a rivulet of blood slide down over my wrist. There was still no pain.

*

Not with a bang but a whimper. Perhaps the most pivotal decisions are made, not in the heat of the moment or during a profound epiphany, but from a place of simple surrender. One day I woke up and the sludge just seemed a little sludgier. The heavy sense of foreboding had become an ounce too burdensome and so I raised my hands to heaven and said, ‘Enough.'

There was no cry for help, no adolescent bravado, just a submissive acceptance of what was for the best. I did not beat my chest and demand to be released from my suffering. I simply determined one Friday evening that my lack of élan was no longer tolerable and I decided to die.

While my mother bathed the two youngest children and Dad sat in the family room, ears plugged into Billy Joel, I undertook a stealth mission to my parents' medicine cabinet. It was a pharmaceutical treasure chest, holding all manner of anti-depressants and sleeping tablets. Many had never been opened, as though somebody had filled prescriptions but never taken the drugs. Perhaps they were someone else's back-up plan.

I pocketed about twenty pills, a cocktail of Serepax and Valium and something else that started with the letter S. I took them to my room with a jug of water and a glass. A soft feeling of serenity washed over me and I smiled. For the first time since Tweed Heads I felt at peace.

My desk was buried under a mountain of schoolwork. The exams were approaching that would supposedly set the course of my future. I was happy to let all that go.

One by one, I swallowed the bitter little dots. Goodbye, Oscar. Bon voyage, Hollywood and New York, New York. Arrivederci, rock stars. Blurred and hazy. Mum walking in. Getting me to my feet. I fell heavily to the bed. Voice. Mum. Angry. Trouble. Dark in the city. Night is a wire. Oblivion.

*

Two days later, I came back from the dead. As Lazarus I had one hell of a headache. Dragging my heavy carcass from the sweat-soaked bed, I opened my curtains and could not tell what time of day it was. Pale blue haloed the gum trees beyond the neighbour's fence. Dawn or dusk? My tongue was swollen and limped about my mouth, seeking moisture like a parched leech.

Quietly I skulked to the bathroom and washed. A change of clothes and a toothbrush livened me up a little. My bed sheets needed stripping and I went so far as to open the window and invite in fresh air and light. The yellowing of the sky confirmed it was early morning and I sat cross-legged on my bed, breathing deeply, eyes shut, listening to the rowdy birdlife outside. Two possibilities – either I was an idiot who couldn't pull off a simple overdose, or divine provenance had stepped in to save my damn life.

Perhaps it was not my time to go. Was there some grand purpose I was meant to fulfil? There was the Oscar. I still felt fame was my destiny. Why did I need this? Why did I feel so out of place and misunderstood? Why couldn't I just want what every-one else wanted? Why couldn't I be who my parents wanted me to be? Had collecting famous sexual partners been a form of vampirism? Was I trying to sap some of their fame DNA? I was a sexual kleptomaniac.

There was no way around it: I wanted to be in film and I wanted to be famous. Maybe this shallow dream
was
driven by feelings of inadequacy – for all my swagger, I was often shy and had a pathological fear of confrontation – but it was my dream nonetheless. How to get there with my terrible teeth was the conundrum. Oscar had a penchant for flashy gnashers. I would need extensive cosmetic dental work if I were to compete with the Brooke Shields and Farrah Fawcetts of the world. My teeth, God bless them, were strong and healthy and without so much as a rumour of a cavity – but they looked like God had poked them higgledy-piggledy into my gums after a big night out. If ever I complained about them to my parents I was scolded for vanity and reminded how lucky I was to have such healthy choppers.

Money, money, money. All the things I could do ... if I had a little money. I sat, that post-suicidal morning, trying to think how I could raise the funds to renovate my smile and follow my dream to New York. I realised I might have to accept a longer timeframe than instantly, but no amount of shifts at McDonald's was ever going to do it. Anyway, I'd tried Maccas when I was fourteen. I'd been sacked at the beginning of 1981 for trying to kiss customers on New Year's Eve.

The answer came like a comet, jetting out of the newspaper classifieds. I sat at the breakfast table, my black-ringed eyes only inches from the tablecloth. My parents danced about tersely on silent tiptoes and I could tell Vesuvius was about to erupt. My close call had made me somewhat less interested in the small-time drama of the generation gap. Ignoring their discomfort, I let my finger touch a small advertisement.

‘Guitar lessons. Former Skyhooks guitarist. Beginners welcome.'

The Skyhooks were the biggest rock act of the seventies. That's it! a voice screamed in my head. Eureka. Don't be a groupie – be a rock star. The Go-Gos. The Bangles. Cyndi Lauper. Suzie Quatro. Blondie. I could play gigs. Make money. Get famous.

But my strobe-lit fantasy dimmed as the recriminations began.

‘We are so disappointed in you,' began my father through tight lips. ‘Your mother and I enjoy a glass of wine at night but your bold … theft … and your … total inebriation …'

‘Terrible,' my mother added.

‘A whole weekend wasted on a hangover.' My father shook his head. ‘You are so immature. We'd thought with the new school ...'

What were they talking about? Wine? Theft? It took a moment for me to realise that my folks assumed my unconsciousness was caused by a gallon of cask wine. As if I would try to kill myself with Riesling! I shook my head in amusement and snorted like an incredulous horse.

‘Don't you dare snort like that. What do you have to say for yourself?' Mum growled.

I wanted to say, ‘Not guilty of being over the limit but guilty of attempted self-murder.' But instead I said, ‘I'm sorry. I was stressed. It won't happen again. I've just been feeling very … empty.'

Both parents stopped raging and looked at me.

‘What could you possibly be stressed about? You have it all. We do everything we can to give you the best life possible.' Dad shook his head and slammed a plate of toast on the table. I knew it was true. ‘We've sent you to ballet, to swimming lessons, speech and drama classes, piano. We've opened up so many opportunities for you. What more can we do to make you happy?'

Mum sighed in frustration. I gave a weak smile and a little shrug.

‘Guitar lessons, maybe?'