Then, of course, there was the time I was busted for drug possession by the cops but this sounds a lot worse than it was. And, to this day, I’m still not sure who it reflects worse on: Me? Or my parents (who, I later discovered, were the ones who dobbed me in)?
When I was away overnight at Year 7 school camp my parents decided to investigate the contents of my makeup case. This was no ordinary makeup case, mind you. Supersized, bulletproof and Barbie pink, this thing came complete with security-code facilities and was just crying out to be filled with pot. Or maybe that was just me. Anyway, Mum and Dad must have had their suspicions because they called in a friend of theirs who was an employee of the police force to see what he could make of the contents. Quite a lot, as it turned out.
On arriving at our house, this cop cracked the foolproof ‘000’ security code on my makeup case in no time—hell, he wasn’t a cop for nothing—and inside discovered a few precious buds of marijuana. (This would have been about one week’s supply for me at that time and, I should point out here, that I never, ever, at any point in my life, pushed drugs. Anything I possessed was purely for my own enjoyment.)
Now, this guy had seen a lot of pot (see above: he wasn’t a cop for nothing) but even so, at my parents’ urging, he checked my stash to make sure what it was. Trouble, wrapped in Barbie-pink, that’s what it was.
When I returned home from camp the next day it was to very angry, very disappointed parents. They immediately shipped me off to stay with my nan in New Zealand for three weeks (‘Do not pass go, do not collect $200’) where, it was thought, all that fresh country air and grass of the dairy-farm variety would do me some good.
When they weren’t calling in the cops, however, my parents’ response to my behaviour was far more predictable. Those first few months of misdemeanours, after years of near-faultlessness, led Mum and Dad to what they believed was the only possible conclusion: It wasn’t my fault.
‘Krystal’s fallen in with the wrong crowd at school!’ they’d say, when other kids’ parents rang up to express their concern.
‘It’s peer pressure!’ they’d chorus, as they were dragged into yet another parent/teacher conference at school.
‘It’s her friends making her do these things; it’s not her!’ they’d assure anyone who’d listen.
Heart-warming testaments to their faith in me, sure. But in truth? Hell, the problem was me.
Things really started to get interesting around the time I got expelled from school. At least, that’s what it sounded like to me when the principal suggested: ‘Krystal, we think the best option is for you to leave our school.’
Best option? For who? The school? Because that felt a lot like expulsion and that surely wasn’t the best option for me. And yet there I was. Less than a year after I started high school, and a fleeting four months since my thirteenth birthday, fate conspired against me and I was asked to leave Mackellar Girls High. And by fate, I mean my own stupidity.
It went like this: It was a stinking hot December day, the kind of day that’s only good for eating Icy Poles and working on your tan, so a group of about five of us decided to wag school and wander down to Forty Baskets, a picturesque private beach near Balgowlah, flanked on one side by bushland and the other by the pristine waters of Manly Cove. The location was just perfect for smoking Winnie Golds and drinking the bottle of Midori I’d nicked from my mum. Perfect also, it turns out, for attempting to steal a dinghy that was moored on the beach and just begging to be taken out on a joy-ride round the bay. But try as we might, the thing wouldn’t budge and so we flopped into it instead to sun ourselves as it sat on the sand.
Lying back against the side of the boat, the PVC surface pleasantly hot through the cotton of my tunic, I let my hand fall against the cool wet sand below us. This beat sitting in a stifling-hot history classroom any day. But you know what was not so hot? Not so hot was doing all this in your school uniform, during school hours, like some sort of beacon for the authorities. We’d just failed Wagging 101.
As we lounged around in the dinghy, getting drunk and getting loud, someone nearby inevitably spotted us and helpfully phoned our school to report us. Who knows, maybe that someone had come down to the beach to take out their dinghy and found it full of pissed, pre-pubescent girls? Whoever it was, it didn’t take them long to recognise our school colours and raise the alarm. Just as it didn’t take our principal and vice-principal long to jump in a car and drive down to Forty Baskets to try and catch us at the scene of the crime.
Now, I can’t recall if I was the ringleader this particular day—and, in defence of my memory, I was pretty drunk—but for a moment it looked like I’d be the scapegoat regardless. When the principal and vice-principal arrived at the beach, my friends and I were lazy with sunshine and languid with alcohol and were unhurriedly stuffing our salty feet back into our school shoes and beginning to amble up the beach.
‘Stop!’ the principal shouted, spying us from the footpath above the beach, as if that directive has ever halted any criminal anywhere and we might just freeze in our tracks.
We grabbed our school bags and bolted. Fast. Slipping through a row of upturned tinnies and running from the beach in the direction of Balgowlah, we scrambled up an embankment with our teachers in pursuit. But coming down the other side of the hill I tripped on a rock, hit the dirt and went tumbling down the slope, grazing the skin on my arm and my leg as I went. Damn it! As I lay sprawled among the rocks and sticks at the bottom of the hill, I felt like the stupidest person in the world. Blood streamed down my shin and my forearm as I hauled myself up and took off again, now trailing my friends but still safely ahead of the principal and vice-principal. Pausing a safe distance on, I turned and checked behind me and saw them awkwardly coming down the hill, puffing and red-faced as they negotiated the loose surface. That was the last we’d see of them that afternoon. Or so I mistakenly thought.
When I got home there was no hiding my injuries from Mum. ‘What happened to you?’ she asked suspiciously as I hobbled through the back door. The numbness from the afternoon’s Midori had worn off and my arm and leg were stinging badly now.
‘Rough game of soccer,’ I lied and retreated to my bedroom.
I might have got away with it, too, you know, if the principal hadn’t already phoned Mum and given her a blow-by-blow of what I’d been up to when she thought I was at school. I was sitting on my bed, rummaging through the first-aid kit, when Mum came barging into my bedroom, shouting: ‘I know what bloody went on today, Krystal! And I’m taking you into the principal’s office this instant! You’re for it now!’
To his credit, the principal asked me to leave his school, rather than outright expel me (as expulsion would go on my school record). But this was of little solace to Mum. After we pulled into the driveway at home, following our short but tense car ride, following our short but tense meeting, Mum turned to me in fury and she slapped me on the arm.
‘Expelled!’ she exploded. ‘Who are you? And what have you done with my daughter? I can’t believe you were expelled!’
Asked to leave, I wanted to correct her but I was too busy raging against that slap. This wasn’t the first time that Mum had slapped me and I think we both knew it wouldn’t be the last. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t like Mum’s blows were hard enough to actually hurt me, not by a long shot; they were more a desperate expression of her total frustration with me. But, naturally, I slapped her right back.
And so there the two of us were, sitting side-by-side in our car seats, still restrained by our seat belts, slapping ineffectually at each other. The blows barely made contact with skin and we were both squealing and slapping and sobbing: ‘I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’ We must have looked like something from an episode of Comedy Capers. Very rarely would Mum and I ever get to the point where we would have a full-on screaming match, a real proper argument. It was more common for us to have these slap-a-thons. Mostly, though, our showdowns either took the form of the ‘silent treatment’ (which was i
nfinitely worse than arguing or slapping), or else Mum simply declared, ‘That’s it: you’re grounded until you’re 21, young lady!’ And she’d mean it, and I would be. Then a week or so later I’d be straight back at it again, doing the very first dumb-arse thing I could think of. It’s no wonder the poor woman tried to slap some sense into me from time to time.
Now, though, I was less than a year into high school and without a high school to go to. Hardly ideal. In desperation, Mum and Dad readied themselves to fork out a mountain of their hard-earned cash and applied for me to attend Manly’s premier all-girls Catholic school, Stella Maris, in what I can only assume was an attempt to exorcise some of my demons. That, and they were running out of options. First, however, I had to be accepted by Stella Maris which, as a private school, isn’t required to take in any old riff-raff that turns up on its doorstep. And so Mum and I set off for another meeting with another school principal.
It’s funny, I regularly go back to Stella Maris these days as part of my role as Director of Pink Hope, the charity I founded. As an ambassador for cancer awareness, I speak at assemblies on the issue of hereditary cancer and of the importance of prevention and vigilance in fighting cancer, and I talk to the girls about what they can do to help raise funds to support charities like ours. My principal is no longer there but that doesn’t mean there’s not plenty that’s still unnervingly familiar about the place today. (Some of my old teachers, for instance, are still there.) Looking out at that sea of maroon and green uniforms, from my viewpoint high up on stage, it’s easy to see that some of the girls are bright-eyed and empathetic and just itching to get involved with our important work. The others? They’re the ones with their heads resting on their friend’s shoulder or examining their nails or picking at their tunic hem while they plan what they’re going to wear to whatever party tomorrow night. Not long ago, that was totally me.
When I visited Stella Maris for the first time, to meet the principal and to see if I would make an acceptable ‘Stella Girl’, I can remember exactly what Mum said to me in the car on the way there because it struck fear into the very core of my being.
‘Krystal,’ Mum announced, ‘today you’re going to have to take responsibility for your bad behaviour.’ I gawped. ‘You,’ she said, ‘are going to have to sit down in front of this new principal and tell him exactly why you’re looking for a new school. You will have to list each and every one of the things you’ve done to get yourself into so much trouble. And you are going to have to ask him whether he is prepared to accept you into his school.’
Ask? Me? I didn’t like the sound of this.
‘Because he doesn’t have to take you, you know,’ Mum added for good measure. ‘And if he doesn’t, who knows where you’ll end up?’
The rest of the trip took place in stony silence as Mum sat contemplating my future and I sat scrolling through my recent past. Drinking? Check. Drugs? Check. Wagging school? Check. The thought of sitting in some stale principal’s office and running through my list of misdemeanours for the benefit of some intimidating, middle-aged man I’d never met filled me with dread. As did the outcome. No school? Versus a Catholic girls school? I wasn’t sure which was worse.
After what seemed like eternity (is there any other way to get to such forgiveness as Stella Maris was offering?), we pulled up at the school gates and made our way towards the front office. ‘Remember,’ Mum said, ‘you’re the one that has to do all the fast talking today.’ And with that, I promptly puked into the principal’s office garden. ‘Krystal!’ Mum was mortified. She yanked me up and wiped me down and frog-marched me into reception.
As it turned out, Stella Maris accepted me with open arms. I think I was too irresistible a prospect for the nuns. They were probably rubbing their hands together with glee as they saw me walk through their gleaming school gates that day. ‘Hallelujah!’ they would have praised. ‘Rehabilitation time!’ Because if there was one soul in that Year 7 cohort that needed shepherding onto the straight and narrow, then it was surely mine. What they didn’t know, of course, was that it would be many, many years to come before that miracle ever took place.
In the meantime, however, I took to Stella Maris College with gusto. In those first few months at my new school I was elected to the Student Representative Council, I quickly settled in with a big group of friends and I even started achieving again on the academic front. On one occasion, my dad bribed me to do something outlandish and try studying for a class maths test. Given it was rare for me to open a textbook of any description, let alone actually read it, Dad offered me $200 to really work my arse off for an upcoming algebra test, if only to see for myself what I might be able to do. Turns out I could do quite a bit if I put my mind to it. I aced the test, scoring 98 per cent and topping my class. Poor Dad was torn between being disgusted and impressed: ‘See what you can do if you try! You’ve got no excuse, Krystal, you’ve got to work harder. Even after rotting your brain with trashy magazines and pot, you can still come top of your class.’
When I decided to be, I was surprisingly adept at academic achievement; the problem was I so rarely decided to be. But in those early months at Stella Maris I really knuckled down, I studied hard and got good results, and my parents must have thought they’d solved the problem of what to do with their wayward teenage daughter.
But then I got bored. Ugh, it was all so tedious! Roll-call and chapel and homework and Saturday morning sport and blah, blah, blah. Fed up with doing what I was supposed to be doing, I fell back into my cycle of old. Drinking and smoking and skipping school and dabbling in pot again. Only now my parents were paying school fees—really expensive school fees—for the privilege of my misbehaviour. I smuggled alcohol into class and I snuck out on the balcony at home to smoke cigarettes. I bought pot from my friends’ older siblings then smoked it at the park and came home reeking of bubblegum and Impulse deodorant in a pathetic attempt to try and mask the gunja scent. Just as soon as I’d showed some signs that I might be getting my act together, I turned around and stuffed things up again.
And then my mum got cancer.
CHAPTER 3
I was in Year 8 when Mum received her diagnosis: malignant tumour, right breast, requiring immediate breast removal due to our family history and the high risk of bilateral cancer (cancer in both breasts). The cancer was detected early enough that Mum had a really good prognosis. And yet, I don’t know whether it was the weight of another instance of cancer in the family, or just the fact this thing had finally, inevitably, come for her, but Mum didn’t cope at all with her diagnosis and subsequent surgery. Emotionally or physically.
Having suffered from anxiety in the past, Mum was now deeply distressed and would frequently break down into uncontrollable crying. She locked herself in her bedroom for hours and just sobbed. She was having panic attacks that were so severe her doctor was talking about admitting her to hospital to help her recover. The surgery itself, while traumatic, was a success. The cancer hadn’t spread to Mum’s lymph nodes and doctors were confident they had removed all existing breast tissue, on both sides, and with it all traces of cancer. Yet after the surgery, things were worse than before.
Mum woke up in terrible emotional shock at having had her breast removed, plus she reacted very negatively to her painkillers. We have a history—my nan, my mum and me—of responding badly to painkillers and anaesthetics. Several years after Mum’s mastectomy I had a regular knee reconstruction and wound up in intensive care because my body couldn’t handle the morphine. I’d only had 2.5 milligrams and still my blood pressure plummeted and my breathing slowed to the point that I was placed on oxygen and nurses had to monitor my condition every few minutes. (You’d think this drug-intolerant family history might factor in my decision to dabble in recreational drugs, but apparently not.) But this was small fry compared to Mum’s reaction to her post-surgery drugs.
To start with she developed a rash on her neck, then she began vomiting violently and this continued for the entire week or
so that she was in hospital. She suffered severe hallucinations; most often she believed that rats were being flung at her face and she would scream in fear at all hours of the day and night. Then one afternoon, eight days after her mastectomy had been deemed a success and less than four hours after she’d arrived home, Mum suffered a severe and adverse drug reaction.
I was sprawled on the couch just outside my parents’ bedroom at the time, and Mum was holed up inside, resting in bed, with Dad hovering nearby. Nan was pottering around in the kitchen somewhere and my little brother was off at Cub Scouts. Suddenly, I heard Dad swear, quietly, from Mum’s bedside. Dad never swore. Dad was calm and placid and logical and even-tempered; he didn’t get flustered, he just got on with it. Dad was not a swearer. Next, I heard him pick up the phone from the bedside table and punch in three short numbers: beep, beep, beep. I held my breath. ‘Ambulance, please.’
They say that in instances like this time slows until it’s practically standing still. Seconds take an age, as if they’ve been spilt from a great height and as they fall they elongate, liquid and languorous, before they pool on the floor. That’s sure as hell not how it felt to me. As we waited for the ambulance to arrive that day, Mum catatonic on her bed, Dad prowling between her bedside and the window overlooking the street, and Nan holed up in the kitchen in immobilised panic, I stopped and started and stopped and started about a million different useless tasks. I know! I’ll get some water. No, no, I’ll stand out the front waiting for the ambos. Or, should I stay here and see if there’s any change in Mum’s breathing? I scuttled in ever-decreasing circles, doing nothing much of anything at all, and the minutes simply evaporated in front of me until two burly ambulance officers bustled into the house. The second ambo, in particular, was impossibly tall and he had to duck to avoid hitting his head as he came in the front door.
The Lucky One Page 3