The Crossroad

by Mark Donaldson, VC

  We put him in the ground. Brent was a pallbearer and found it pretty difficult to keep himself from tears. Mum, as well as being overwhelmed by her grief, was stressed out because her stepmother Joan was there, with our grandfather, and getting in the way. Because Mum was small and easygoing, some people thought they could walk all over her. I’m sure Joan was trying to help, but for Mum it was the final straw. At some point during that day she snapped and told Joan to back off. Because Mum losing her temper was so out of character, Joan took it personally and got all huffy.

  The wake was back at the house. Brent went back to Newcastle and I took a couple of weeks off school to help Mum. The adjustment to losing Dad was bigger than either of us could have imagined and a catalyst for more change. Suddenly it felt like there was nothing there. He wasn’t there to take me fishing or do the other things we did. I thought a lot about how our relationship had been improving, and couldn’t control my bitterness. Mum tried her best to control me, but she was so busy, having to work incredibly hard to keep things going, and was dealing with the change from being a family to being a single mum of two teenage boys, one away from home and the other a bit of a handful.

  I found myself at home a lot on my own. I got a taste for independence and moved down to the cellar, which had a separate entrance, so I could come and go as I pleased. It was a pretty dingy place, more like a cold, damp dungeon, but it suited me. I got a puppy, a kelpie-ridgeback-labrador cross I named Lister after the character on Red Dwarf. Lister went everywhere with me. Tan with a white blaze and socks, he looked like a well-groomed dingo. A boy and his dog are thick as thieves, and I saw Lister as my wingman and confidant. Through Angie and now Lister, I was building a bond with canines that would turn into a wartime partnership that would save my life. In his way, Lister played his role in saving my life back then.

  In recent years, I’ve seen military families when kids have lost their dads. They just want to be with their friends. I think I know what they’re trying to do – being with their friends lets them pretend life is going on as normal. If I sat with Mum at nights and on weekends, it would just remind me of what we’d lost. I couldn’t face it. I know this was a selfish attitude, and have great regrets about not looking after Mum more, but I was fifteen going on sixteen and focused on my own survival. She wanted to do things together, but I fobbed her off. My mates were now my substitute family, and I saw them as much as I could.

  After school, I locked myself in my bedroom with Lister, put on some music, smoked, and then went out to trap rabbits or have a run. I came back and had dinner with Mum, but instead of sitting with her and watching TV at night, I went off to do my own thing. I hitchhiked around the area to wherever friends were having a party. By the time Friday afternoon came, I’d bolt home from school, get changed, and go out and buy some bottles of rum. The parties would go on until Sunday, ranging from Dorrigo down to Bellingen and Coffs Harbour. I had mates in towns down the line and in Coffs, so there were always places to stay and people to meet, girls to hook up with, fights to get into.

  It was mateship and loyalty as much as escape that I was looking for. My friends probably saw me as a reliable mate. If they were getting some bourbon for the weekend, I was always up for it. We pushed all kinds of limits, but if anyone got into trouble, they could rely on me. We had a kind of pact: if anything goes wrong, I’m there for you. My closest mates were Murray and another schoolfriend, Vaughan, who was going to do a carpentry apprenticeship. I was probably the biggest risk-taker in the group, getting really drunk and vandalising things, but I was by no means alone.

  We couldn’t get into pubs or clubs, so we had to make our own pointless fun. We’d walk down the street kicking car mirrors, smashing windows and doors or throwing bins around. We had slingshots and set up ambushes for people who were just walking along: we’d smash the streetlights while they were under them. Or we’d throw rocks up at a balcony where people were trying to have a good night. We’d bump into another bunch of kids and get into a fight, then wash our wounds off with rum. There were some massive street brawls in Bellingen and Coffs. You wouldn’t go looking for fights, but it was going to happen with groups of kids wandering around drunk. Our version of a great night was doing that, sleeping it off and then going again the next night. Or we’d find girls to hang out with. We’d make up dares about breaking into places, to see if it could be done. There were other groups of guys who broke into cars and houses to steal, but for me it was for the fun of it, to meet the challenge of getting into difficult places without getting caught. We were quite resourceful, getting a Bunsen burner and hacksaw and breaking locks. The most we ever pinched was a souvenir or two – useless crap, just to show we’d got in. It certainly wasn’t the law-abiding life you would hope goes into a soldier’s make-up, but to me, the way I rationalised it, we were a unit: setting ourselves dangerous tasks, executing them and getting out undetected, taking huge risks and doing everything for our mates.

  That took us through the summer, but when the school year started again there was no let-up in the weekend partying. The amazing thing was, we’d still go and play soccer or rugby on the weekend. We were too young to be getting bad hangovers, so we didn’t know we were hurting ourselves.

  Mum wasn’t blind to what was going on but she didn’t know what to do about it, and we fought a lot. I had an undercut, trying my best to look like Kurt Cobain, and lived in this grimy cellar. I remember one weekend she had gone away to Newcastle to visit Brent and I said I was staying at home. I had a rugby game on down the coast. After that I invited a few friends back to my place for some drinks. We got a bit wild and fairly drunk. Stupidly, I took my mate’s parents’ car for a spin in the paddock. It was then decided that a good idea would be to do a 10-k loop near home. My mate took over the wheel. There were four of us in the car and we ended up rolling it on a dirt road. It was really stupid but luckily no one was injured; the car was totalled but still running. We limped it home to my place, the roof all flattened and one of the tyres popped so there were sparks shooting from the rim. It was a write-off. Dumb idea, that’s for sure. We stupidly thought we could fix it overnight, but there was no hope. It is madness doing that sort of thing, and we learnt the hard way.

  To create some kind of structure, Mum got me into karate classes at Bellingen a few years earlier and drove me down there two nights a week. My karate teacher, Kathy Sweeney, taught traditional-style martial arts, emphasising respect. I took that very seriously, never seeing karate as a channel for taking out my aggression. Though my life might have looked chaotic from the outside, from the inside I was committed to my causes. There was loyalty to my mates, there was karate, and I was also lifting weights. One thing I wasn’t doing was lying around waiting for bad thoughts to get in. In fact, I was frenetically moving, doing anything to create an outlet for that burning feeling inside, the causes of which were transparent to everyone except me.

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t bring that commitment to my studies. I was sporadically trying to focus on my HSC, but was just getting through the year. A few months before the end, I was pulled out of art class with a few others. The teacher said, ‘Here’s a test. Give it a go. If you do any good, they’ll accept you on a scholarship.’ It was a college of fine arts in Sydney. I thought, Yeah, I’ll give it a crack. I was into graffiti and reading graphic novels. I could never draw that well – better than average, but not great – but it was the best thing going for me at the time, and when I got accepted for the scholarship, I took it as a lifeline. By the start of the next year, 1997, I would be getting out of Dorrigo and off for a new adventure in the big city. My wish to escape now had a physical destination.

  Brent was coming home for occasional weekends and his university holidays, and took it upon himself to pull me into line. There was a lot of bickering. One day he asked me to cut his hair in the kitchen with a set of clippers. They were blunt and pulling his hair, but he thought I was doing it deliberatel
y. He got into me, and I said, ‘Shove it up your arse and do it yourself then, you princess.’

  He burred up at that, and we were going toe to toe. I swung with a closed fist and hit him in the face. We’d always fought, like any pair of brothers, but it had never got to a punch in the face. He took it full-on and grabbed a couple of knives from the kitchen drawer. Mum, who was in the garden, heard the shouting and came in to see us facing off.

  ‘I’m gunna stab you!’ Brent shouted.

  ‘Okay, come on, do it!’

  It eventually de-escalated, and I pissed off to see what my mates were doing. I didn’t come back home until he’d left.

  That wasn’t the last of our fights during what was the worst period of our relationship – but not the worst period of our lives, which was still to come. On another visit, Brent was going on at me about everything I was doing wrong. I was flunking at school, I was drinking and smoking, I shouldn’t be allowed to have a dog, and I wasn’t looking after Mum.

  ‘You’re not here any more, you don’t run this place,’ I said. I was going to add, And you’re not the old man. The thought of that sent me into a rage, and I screamed, ‘I’m gunna bash you till you’re bleeding.’ I charged after him, but he got away and kept his distance. We laugh about it now, but it was a real low point.

  Speaking of low points, I completed the HSC with predictable results. The day they were getting posted out, I was sitting in front of the Dorrigo post office. There was a boy there who’d gone to a private school. We sat and opened our envelopes. He asked me what I’d got and I told him.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ he said. ‘Join the army?’

  I sprang up and told him to get fucked. I shoved my finger in his face and said, ‘Why would I join the army? I’ve got a fucken scholarship to a college in Sydney, I’m moving out of this shithole. Have fun working for your dad for the rest of your life.’

  The poor guy didn’t know how to take it. There was a bunch of other private-school kids, the children of the well-to-do townspeople, hanging around, and I turned to them and said, ‘Guess what? Now I don’t have to know you any more, yous can go and get fucked!’

  They probably thought I was a wanker, and fair enough. It was ironic, too, when you consider where I did end up.

  Meanwhile, I was pulling back from all the drinking and fighting and partying all weekend. Maybe I’d had my schoolies a year early. Or maybe it was just that I had to be different from the crowd. Like Dad, I’m a non-conformist, and that went for hedonism as much as schoolwork. When all the other kids let loose and went out partying, I went the opposite way. Now that I knew I’d be moving to Sydney, I wanted to save some money. I went to an extreme in that direction, too. Mum knew a businessman through the surgery who got me a job planting trees. I worked whole weeks, starting at five o’clock in the morning and going until sundown putting trees in the ground. I wasn’t afraid of working if I was getting paid for it. It got me out of home and gave me an excuse when people were asking me to go down to Coffs. Some weekends I still got involved, but I always needed some new kind of stimulation, and I was bored with constant partying. Breaking through the weariness and boredom, getting fit and healthy, sticking with a job – this was the new challenge I was setting myself, and as always I wanted to see how far I could go.

  Most Fridays, I was so tired from a week’s work I’d crash out and think about Sydney.

  FOUR

  Despite all the hell I’d been giving her, Mum was tireless in trying to smooth the way for me. She must have been anxious about me going down to Sydney on my own – Ross and Val were my only relatives there – but, just as she’d organised that job for me planting trees, now she set me up with a place to live.

  She knew a clerical worker at the Bellingen credit union. I’d met Chris Watt a few times and had found him weird. He was a bland-looking man, what I’d call a pencil-neck, quite tall and skinny with brown hair and glasses. He was a widower – his wife had hanged herself, apparently – and he had three grown-up children, two daughters and a son. Chris and Mum were friends, but it was pretty obvious to me that he wanted something more. He was ingratiating towards me, trying much too hard to be my pal, and came over to offer to do jobs around the house for Mum when she hadn’t asked him. I might have been full of bravado at that time, but I was a pretty good judge of character, and I told Mum not to trust him: he was a weasel. Mum assured me that she had no intention of forming a serious relationship with him. She’d been making a friendship with another guy in town, and when someone said to her, ‘I hear you’re in a relationship,’ she got very indignant and said it was too soon after losing Dad. Chris had acted quite jealous of this other man, which also alerted me to his agenda. But in any case, I was leaving and had to trust that Mum knew what she was doing. Besides, it was only normal that a teenage boy would be protective of his mum when he’s moving away, and so maybe I was overreacting to the gut feeling I had.

  Chris’s younger daughter, Sally, was living in a flat in Artarmon, on the north shore of Sydney. Mum organised for me to move into their spare room for a few months. It was a good location, as the art college was in North Sydney, and I went down and began to focus on my graphic design studies. Well, for a few weeks, anyway. I was soon thinking, How good is this place? I was still seventeen years old, nowhere near as mature as I thought I was, and felt like I was in Disneyland. I suddenly found new barriers to try to crash my way through.

  Wednesday night was $5-jug night at a pub near the college, and that was the trigger for a five-day party lasting till Sunday. I’d go to live bands and meet a lot of people with similar interests: girls and parties. It wasn’t the same as in Dorrigo, where friendship was based on loyalty – it was more that I got on with people who liked the same music and bars and, inevitably, the same partying ways. The friendships were fun but fleeting, based on interests more than deeper affinities.

  I lived at Artarmon for a couple of months. Sally was the only one of Chris Watt’s children I got to know, and she was nice. Her elder sister, Christine, lived on the Gold Coast and was somewhat estranged from her father. The son, Jon, had a car accident during this time and became a quadriplegic. I had no idea how that was affecting Chris.

  A girl from Dorrigo I knew, Melissa, now lived in a four-bedroom terrace in Camperdown, then a run-down industrial and student housing area in inner Sydney. Five years older than me, Melissa used to work at a shop in Dorrigo and let us smoke cigarettes out the back. She was very pretty, and was now in a lesbian relationship. A room came free, and she asked me if I wanted to move in. It was twenty bucks cheaper and a lot more interesting than Artarmon, and proximity to college was less and less of a priority for me.

  Through Melissa I met a new group of people, all older than me. The girls in Artarmon were country girls living in the city, whereas Melissa moved with an exotic crowd. Nelly, one of the flatmates, had done a journalism course and was writing for the Triple J magazine. She was hanging out with indie bands, and crowds of people came over to party. I was the baby of the house, seventeen years old and the only boy. The girls never condescended to me, always including me in their activities, and it was pretty much the dream lifestyle, for a while anyway.

  I was starting to realise that college wasn’t what I’d hoped for. As much as I liked drawing and other skills, there were a lot of wankers there. It was an industry college and they brought in graphic designers who told us what it was like in the workforce, and it sounded like shit. You had to suck up to clients and tell them how great they were and put up with their rubbish ideas. A lot of it was geared towards the advertising industry, and I was more interested in coming up with artistic ideas and letting designers design. North Sydney had a very businessy crowd, while I was absorbed in that new punkish movement at Camperdown. Life was very different north of the harbour, and I couldn’t see a spot for myself in that world of executives in grey suits, with zany ties and socks to show ho
w artistic they were.

  Financially, college was a grind too. There was an art supplies shop downstairs from the college, and I stole everything I needed for class. I didn’t want to ask Mum for 500 bucks for paper and paint, or for a computer so I could do design. She was already putting Brent through university, and I rationalised stealing as an economic risk I had to take. The girl who worked in the shop knew full well what I was doing but didn’t say anything. She knew I couldn’t afford to pay. In fact, we became friends and she ended up moving into our house.

  There was also a food court downstairs from the college. All the other kids bought their lunch, but I waited until the end of each day, when I’d go to the Chinese restaurants and ask, ‘What are you throwing out?’ They’d give me a big bag of containers full of leftover food, and that was what I lived on.

  I don’t want to overstress the poverty, because I did have enough money for food. It was just that I preferred to save it for other things. Alcohol, for a start – there were a lot of parties going on – and my interest was sparking up. I’d go on benders, staying awake for five days to see how far I could push it. I thought it was fun – I just wanted to see what would happen. I wasn’t getting into fights like at home, and hanging out with those girls was great. As a house we’d go to the Bank, the Oxford, the Town Hall, all the Newtown pubs. At the Oxford we knew the bouncers, the carpet was sticky, and there was the same bunch every Friday night. No one cared how drunk you got as long as you didn’t cause any trouble. It was my kind of crowd.

  There was still some of the old north-coast lair in me. Vaughan, my mate from Dorrigo who was doing a carpentry apprenticeship in Sydney, came out with me one night to hear a band at a pub near the airport. Afterwards, we were pushing each other in supermarket trolleys. We came to a showroom in Alexandria, and tried to smash as many windows as we could with our trolleys and then with our elbows. After that it was a street run smashing windows, doors, anything down the street. People came out of the houses. We threw whatever we could at them and continued on. We got away with it, though when we got home we were digging massive pieces of glass out of our elbows.