Years later, when I held my firstborn, Riley, I finally understood just how much a parent loves their child, but as a teenager I had no real concept of this. Or, if I did, I chose to ignore it. When she was first diagnosed with cancer and she was fearful she would die, Mum sat down and wrote me a heartfelt (heartbreaking) letter. As it turned out, she didn’t give it to me until many years later because there simply wasn’t any need to and in hindsight I’m glad that she didn’t. Because until I was older I would never have appreciated just how very special it was. It read:
To my darling precious daughter Krystal,
My heart is breaking writing this letter, my tears are falling wondering if I will survive this dreadful disease. I want so much to see you marry and have children of your own. I should have written this letter years ago, bad health or not. I have had an amazing life, I am very grateful for that. I married, had babies and I’m very grateful for that reason. This letter is to give you courage and strength. I want you to never give up on the power of hope.
When your wedding day comes, erase your memory, do not mourn me on this special day, and embrace this beautiful day.
This is your journey now, I dreamt of this day watching you walk down the aisle on your father’s arm. I will hold that thought in my heart forever.
Remember, health and happiness is far more important than wealth. Listen to your husband, take guidance, give love, be understanding, forgive, be positive and supportive. Work things through, it’s too easy to walk away from problems, work through them. And, most of all, respect one another.
Your babies: how I dream of their smell holding them in my arms. The happiness of their births. The gift of a child is an amazing precious journey. Now you will know how I felt when I gave birth to you, I felt peace when I looked into your eyes, I felt brave beyond words. I was exhausted after a long difficult labour but when I saw you for the first time I felt calm, free of pain and instantly in love. I wanted you so much it hurt in my heart, I asked for a little girl and I got you. You were my childhood dream.
I was given two beautiful gifts from your dad and that’s you and Andrew.
A mother is so protective; have patience, give your children opportunities in life, be observant, listen. You will feel sometimes you are on a rollercoaster but you will get off that rollercoaster, never forget that. Be creative with them, give them wisdom, you will be an inspirational mother, you will dazzle, my darling.
I will hold you in my heart forever when you are thinking of me, I will be thinking of you, my baby girl. Be brave, my darling, and have courage; you are not alone. Remember the journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.
I will love you forever.
Mummy x
When I was a teenager I placed no value on my own life, which allowed me to act as badly as I did. And it wasn’t until after those first few precious hours of holding my son Riley in my arms that I turned to Mum and Dad and said, ‘Oh my god, I’m so sorry.’ I put my mum, in particular, through such a terribly tough time and, awful as the truth is, it wouldn’t have made any difference whether she had been diagnosed with cancer or not. I was out of control and Mum’s cancer wasn’t the reason. My teenage years were spent not coping; not coping with cancer, but also not coping with just being me. It would be a long and very rocky road before I accepted this, and to get where I am now. But first there was much worse to come.
CHAPTER 4
During my childhood I spent almost every weekend visiting my Nanny Beryl. Now, this was no cup-of-tea-and-if-you’re-lucky-a-biscuit affair. No keep-your-voice-down-Nanny’s-sleeping (or speak-up-Nanny-doesn’t-have-her-aids-in) effort. Not even close. No, my Nanny Beryl was, and still very much is, fabulous.
Beryl is my dad’s mum and she lives in Frenchs Forest, a leafy suburban idyll about twenty minutes drive from our house. For the longest time she was the sole carer for my grandpa, Dudley, who had suffered from Parkinson’s Disease since he was 36 years old. So when I was a kid and went to visit my grandparents I loved seeing my grandpa, but it was really Nanny Beryl who was the star of the show. And with good cause.
Nanny Beryl was a grandma without limits. If I told her I wanted to be a hairdresser then she’d rummage through her kitchen drawer for a pair of scissors and brandish them in the air, saying, ‘Well, let’s get started! Come on, show me how good you are!’ Then she’d plonk herself down at the dining room table and let me, five-year-old me, hack at her hair. ‘You can only cut this much,’ Nanny would instruct me, holding her thumb and index finger a centimetre apart, but ‘this much’ can quickly become ‘that much’ when you’re five and often I’d be left with a hefty chunk of hair in my chubby apprenticed hands. But Nanny never seemed to mind and so I’d be employed as her hairdresser, weekend after weekend, until I was on to my next phase.
Like, being an actress. My favourite thing to do at Nanny Beryl’s was to watch ‘olden-day’ movies with her. Gone with the Wind, Calamity Jane, The Wizard of Oz: I adored them all and knew every word. Still do. When Oklahoma! came on TV recently and I broke into (word-perfect) song, my husband looked at me like I was mad. ‘How can the same person love Britney Spears and Rodgers & Hammerstein?’ he asked, shaking his head. What can I say? I’m a sucker for the classics. And with Nanny Beryl on the couch beside me, these old technicolour relics became magical. We’d be watching Meet Me in St Louis and Nanny would turn to me and say, ‘See Judy Garland there, Krystal? She looks just like you do.’ And I believed her, as I imagined my life with Tom Drake, dancing at the Christmas Eve ball in St Louis.
We’d play banks and I’d be the teller whose name was always ‘Rose’ and, years later, I discovered Nanny had kept all the ‘cheque books’ I’d scribbled in when doling out my millions. I was really into drama as a kid and Nanny Beryl always encouraged me here, too. When I was in primary school I was selected for the Metropolitan North Drama Ensemble and chosen for the role of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (there was Judy Garland again). As Dorothy, I performed solo at Sydney’s State Theatre and then at the Sydney Opera House and I firmly believe it was my Nanny Beryl who gave me the skills and the confidence to do that.
Together Nanny Beryl and I performed the canon of great theatrical works: Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood and, let’s not forget, Cinderella. Naturally, I would be Cinderella, in all her glass-slipper-shod glory, while Nanny took on the supporting roles of the Ugly Stepsisters and Prince Charming and the pumpkin coach and every single other cast member I could dream up. Or, in Sleeping Beauty, I would lie (dramatically) on the couch, concentrating on looking beautiful while Nanny put the rest of the characters through their paces, until I deigned to be woken from my slumber.
Nanny Beryl was my best friend.
I remember being nine years old and going into hospital to have my tonsils removed. Nanny Beryl never left my side the entire three days I stayed at Mona Vale hospital. She sat with me all day, tickling my arm and reading me stories, and then at night she slept in a chair by my bedside. I always hoped if I ever had children that my mum would love them like Nanny Beryl loved me (and, of course, she does).
But perhaps the best thing about Nanny was her stories. At night Nanny used to lie down on my bed with me and tell me all about my dad’s side of the family, the Barters. We were of French stock, Nanny told me, from the medieval fortress city, Carcassonne, in the south of France; although the first Barters arrived in Australia as free settlers as early as 1838. Nanny’s father, my great-grandad Colin Whitfield, fought at Gallipoli during World War I. ‘He was a war hero, my dad,’ Nanny would tell me proudly, before regaling me with stories of his adventures at Lone Pine after he lied about his age and enlisted with the Anzacs before he’d even turned eighteen. He survived, too, which was no mean feat at Gallipoli. (I guess they make them pretty tough on both sides of my family.)
‘Tell me about our bushranger again,’ I’d boss Nanny. Our bushranger was Flash Dan Charters, who was my third great-uncle (my grandfather’s great-uncle).<
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‘Oh, you don’t want to hear that silly story again,’ Nanny would tease. ‘Ole Flash? You mean Flash Dan, right-hand-man to the great bushranger Ben Hall, the biggest, baddest bushranger this side of Forbes? That Flash Dan? The one who was right there by Ben Hall’s side when he bailed up the Cobb & Co and stole all that gold? The one who was there when Ben Hall was hunted down by the troopers, one, two, three? You mean, that Flash Dan? The one who was a local hero, who robbed the rich to feed the poor, is that the one you’re talking about?’
‘Yes! That one!’ I’d shout, exasperated, my Annie Hall finger-pistols hooked into the elastic waistband of my PJs. ‘I said, tell me about our bushranger!’
Now, I don’t know exactly how much of Nanny Beryl’s bushranger stories were fact and how much were fiction. I’ve never since asked and she’s never divulged. There’s no denying Flash Dan Charters is my third great-uncle and that he was friend enough to Ben Hall that he was godfather to Hall’s firstborn child. But from there the details become a little hazy. Did he bail up stagecoaches? Was he the Robin Hood of Central Western New South Wales? Who’s to say? But none of that really mattered to me, what mattered was the hope that Flash Dan brought me; hope that I might grow up to one day be just like him, or like my great-grandad Colin Whitfield, our hero of Gallipoli, or, hell, like Nanny Beryl herself. Like anyone, in fact, from any branch or from any limb of the Barter family tree, anyone that grew up and did something fantastic other than beating cancer.
Because that was the difference.
While my dad’s family all seemed to be out having heroic adventures or achieving amazing thing—things worthy of a Nanny Beryl bedtime story—Mum’s family fought cancer. That’s unfair of me, I know. Mum’s mum (my nan), for instance, ran a farm and raised two children, both of which are important things and things to be very, very proud of. She has had the toughest life (only recently, for example, she recovered from major heart surgery to repair her aorta which was damaged as a direct result of radiotherapy) and she has experienced so much. And yet she’s the kindest person you could ever hope to meet. But what defines Nan’s life, her salient achievement, has been battling and beating that bloody cancer. All the women in the Codlin family, all those victims of the ‘Codlin cancer curse’, they fought cancer. That was their life’s work simply because they didn’t have the chance to do anything else; they were too busy just surviving. And our family stories reflect that. On Mum’s side we focus on cancer, not on achievements or milestones or those hilarious personal anecdotes that all families tell and re-tell even though they aren’t really amusing to anyone who’s not blood related to you. No, the Codlin family history has been completely overshadowed by cancer. That’s it; that’s all we talk about.
So it was good to hear Nanny Beryl’s stories and to learn that I had a history beyond disease and maybe a future, too. That I might grow up to be an actress or a bankteller or a bushranger or, hell, anything other than sick. Until one day, when I must have been about twelve years old, I announced to Nanny Beryl that I wouldn’t be going to visit her anymore.
‘I’m grown up now,’ I explained. ‘So I don’t want to come over here, I’d rather stay at my friends’ houses now, thanks.’
And so that was the end of my weekends at Nanny Beryl’s. She told me, much later, that she’d sobbed for weeks after my grand announcement, but I had no inkling of it at the time. I simply turned on my newly independent heel and trotted off into the next stage of my life. Although, at various times over the next few years, I would have done just about anything to be back, safe, on Nanny Beryl’s mustard-coloured velour couch, waiting for Scarlett O’Hara to realise her love for poor Rhett, or holding my breath while Nanny Prince Charles fitted my glass slipper.
‘Krystal, where are your shoes!’
It wasn’t a question, just a statement of exasperation. And as the words left her mouth, Mum’s outstretched arms flailed out from her sides, as if she was trying to demonstrate the enormity of her frustration. Those arms swam before my eyes like jellyfish tentacles. I giggled, then gasped in pain.
‘Krystal! Get up!’ Mum was sliding from frustration to anger and fast. So fast, in fact, she hadn’t realised the ridiculousness of what she’d said. Because if there was one thing I wasn’t going to be doing that night, it was getting myself up from where I was splattered across the slimy floor of the Newport Arms women’s toilets, my face streaked with mascara, my skirt hoiked up around my underwear, and my shoes? I had no idea where my shoes were.
‘Mark? You’d better come in here,’ Mum shouted to my poor dad, who was hovering awkwardly in the doorway of the ladies bathroom, trying not to look like a middle-aged man who was hovering awkwardly in the doorway of the ladies bathroom. He shuffled inside.
‘Shit,’ Dad said, assessing the situation and hitting the nail on the head in more ways than one. For a man who didn’t swear he was becoming quite adept at it. ‘What the hell have you done to yourself?’
‘Meneeeeee,’ I groaned.
It was true; I’d finally done my knee. For the past few months I had been regularly injuring my left knee while I was out partying. It was nothing major, or so I thought at the time, just a case of tripping over some (ill-placed) furniture or stumbling up some (ill-placed) steps when I was drunk. Easy enough to do. The problem was that I was drunk a lot, like, every night on the weekend (and by weekend I mean Thursday through to Sunday nights, inclusive, with the odd Wednesday night thrown in for good measure). And if I wasn’t drunk, I was on ecstasy or speed (except for the times I was drunk and on ecstasy or speed). In short, that knee of mine copped a battering.
But was that going to stop me? Hell no! By the time I was eighteen and I had finally left school (as in: graduated, I didn’t leave via expulsion this time), I was partying like it was 1999 even though it was well into the new millennium. I was a party animal, the party starter, the party queen, never a party pooper. My phone rang almost 24/7 with friends checking up to see what was going down. I was fun with a capital ‘F’.
‘Be at the party tonight, Krystal?’
‘Gunna see you at Charlie Bar?’
‘Not having a quiet one, are you, Krystal?’
‘Hey, know where I can get it on tonight?’
Yes, yes, hell no, and, of course.
I never wasted a second that could have been better spent getting wasted and if that pesky knee popped out of alignment, as it did on seven or eight occasions, well then, I simply whacked it back in again on the spot and got back to enjoying myself. Until that night at Newport Arms. It took several attempts for me to crack my knee back into place and when I finally did it was with a stomach-churning ‘crunch’. The pain! It sliced through my drunken haze and I cried out in agony. My friends, unable to get me to stand or move, were forced to phone my parents to come and get me.
‘Can you stand?’ my dad asked optimistically.
‘Do you think she can stand?’ Mum snapped, glaring at me. I pressed the heels of my hands into the putrid green tiles and made a show of trying to put weight through them.
‘Uuuuugh,’ I slurred dramatically, as if I’d somehow managed to move myself even a centimetre.
‘Come on then,’ Dad said and he shoved his hands under my armpits and hoisted me up off the ground. ‘We can’t leave you here.’ (Both he and Mum looked tempted.) Then the three of us headed out through the throbbing bar like some strange five-legged animal: me, slumped drunkenly all over Dad, my injured leg dangling uselessly at a right angle ahead of us. We led the way, while Mum hustled behind us, shouldering my ludicrously tiny handbag. I never did find my shoes from that night.
My parents drove me straight from the pub to Manly Hospital, where the prognosis wasn’t pretty. Neither was its delivery. ‘You’ve obviously been drinking,’ the doctor said curtly. It was a statement of fact (with a side-order of judgement). He was as unimpressed as my parents were.
‘Wannagooome,’ I replied.
‘You’re not going anywhere fast,�
� he said. ‘So I hope you had a good night; it’ll be your last for a while. You’ve stuffed that knee good and proper.’
He wasn’t wrong. I’d dislocated my knee so severely this time that a full knee reconstruction was required. And while a knee recon isn’t life-threatening surgery, it did mean I needed a general anaesthetic and several days stay in hospital (especially after I had that allergic reaction to the morphine, as I mentioned before). As I sat up in my hospital bed, surrounded by septuagenarians who were having various decrepit joints replaced after a lifetime of vigorous lawn bowls, I pondered what it means to need a knee reconstruction when you’re just nineteen years old. But, then, I was hammering my body with so much drink and drugs and drunken dancing and a drunken diet that, I suppose, something had to give and that something was my knee. For anyone that hasn’t had a knee reconstruction, let me tell you now: it bloody hurts. On a scale of one to child birth, knee surgery and its associated rehabilitation is up there at the kill-me-now end of things. So you’d expect that excruciating pain of this degree, and for what was ostensibly a self-inflicted injury, might be enough to make me stop and think about my life. Or not.
In my case: not. Hell, I wasn’t pausing long enough to think or to reflect or to see the error of my ways and take up Bikram yoga and bircher muesli. There was still fun to be had (with that capital ‘F’!) and it wasn’t long before I was out of my hospital gown and back on the dance floor. Because if there’s one thing that’s hot, fellas, it’s a drunk girl in a miniskirt wearing a knee brace!
At this stage of my life getting wasted was my life. If you’d sat next to me on a plane and watched me fill out one of those ‘Incoming Passenger’ cards, then you would have seen me write ‘Partying’ in the little empty boxes next to ‘Occupation’. After completing the Higher School Certificate, I was accepted into the Australian Catholic University at Strathfield to study a Bachelor of Teaching in Primary School Education. (Fancy leaving your kids in my care for the day?) For six studious weeks there, I was a model university scholar. I attended lectures and contributed to class discussions in my tutorials; I read my course handouts and queued dutifully to buy textbooks from the Co-Op Bookshop. And then someone invited me to a Subski party at Sydney University. Real. Bad. Idea.
The Lucky One Page 5