The Lucky One

by Krystal Barter

  And yet, on some level, I don’t regret any of the things I did as a teenager. They shaped the person I am today and I’m (finally) proud of who that person is. I believe everything happens for a reason and if I didn’t take the path I did, I may never have met my husband and had my beautiful children. How can I regret the chain of decisions that got me here?

  What I can say without hesitation is: I’m a better person for experiencing what I did. If I hadn’t rebelled so much when I was younger, I might never have come to appreciate my life and my family in the way I do now. Maybe it’s true that we do have to nearly lose the things that mean the most for us to realise just how important they are.

  And even though I partied hard and fast, teenagers are known for that kind of behaviour so it wasn’t like I was alone. I still see so many kids around the Northern Beaches today who are out of control and I fear for some of them. Not even the best parents, a great education and awesome friends could stop me from acting the way I did, and I know not all of the kids I see are so lucky. If my children ever come to me and tell me they’re struggling with drugs, or they’re in some other kind of trouble, I’ll sure as hell feel empathy for them. Moreover, I’ll be able to tell them that I know their pain can end and that it’s possible for them to turn their lives around if they want to. I know; I’ve done it.

  But perhaps the most important thing to come from all this is the realisation that my past doesn’t have to define me. It’s taken me a long time to get here but I’ve finally made peace with the fact that I was a pretty awful daughter (and sister and granddaughter and friend) when I was a teenager, but that doesn’t mean I’m an awful person, full stop. No, I get to choose—fresh, new, each and every day—who I am now and how I’m going to live my life. Just like I chose to have a double mastectomy to try and avoid walking in the cancerous footsteps of my mother and my grandmother, I chose to stop wasting my life on drugs and then changed things for the better. Anyone who knew me as a drug-stuffed, out-of-control teenager would struggle to believe the wife and mother and businesswoman I’ve become today. But it was only when I realised I didn’t have to be the person I was back then—that I hadn’t signed anything to say ‘this is who Krystal Anne Barter is now and so, therefore, who I will be for the rest of my natural life’—and accepted this, that I was finally able to change.

  Well, that, and because I met a boy.

  CHAPTER 6

  Chris was everything I never went for in a guy. I liked the heroin-chic, skinny look; he was a body-builder. I sought the life ’n’ soul of the party; Chris was quiet. I craved ‘bad boy’; Chris was a never-done-drugs-before kinda boy. No one in their right mind would have pictured us together. Luckily, my friend Paul was nowhere near his right mind when he suggested that Chris and I should hook up.

  ‘You’ve gotta meet my flatmate, Krystal. His name’s Chris. And I think he’s perfect for you.’

  ‘Really?’ My mind conjured up an image of Johnny Depp in his 21 Jump Street years, perhaps with a dash of Gregory Peck from Roman Holiday. Dark, brooding, dangerous. In my daydream we were hopping from party to party, pausing just long enough to tear up the dance floor, Dirty Dancing-style, in front of our adoring crowd, before he whisked me off into a taxi and home for a night of wild and debauched passion.

  ‘Yeah, he’s the most boring guy I know,’ Paul said.

  Boring? ‘Er, you’re not really selling him to me, Paul.’

  ‘Yeah, but he needs you, Krystal! If anyone can liven this guy up, then it’s you.’

  ‘Uh, thanks. But, no thanks.’

  ‘Seriously, we’re desperate!’ According to Paul, all Chris did was go to work, go to the gym and then fall asleep in front of bad, prime-time TV. If they didn’t introduce someone like me into his life, then their once-happy household might have to endure Better Homes & Gardens on TV every Friday night from now until eternity. ‘So for the love of god, Krystal, take him out!’

  And that’s how my husband and I met.

  The first time I met Chris my salient impression was: muscles. Because, boy, were there a lot of them. Chris and I moved in similar social circles so I’d seen him around at various parties and nightclubs, but I’d never taken much notice of him. Those muscles had put me off. But now Paul had arranged for the two of us to ‘meet’ properly and so here I was having dinner in Charlie Bar in Manly, up close and personal with all that rippling flesh.

  ‘How’s your steak?’ I began safely enough.

  ‘Good,’ Chris replied.

  ‘Is it? That’s good. That ragout with it looks delicious, too. I nearly wish I’d ordered the same as you instead of this pizza,’ I said, fiddling nervously with the crust. ‘Not that this pizza is bad!’ I added hurriedly. ‘I mean, you have to try pretty hard to make a pizza bad, right? It’s just that your meat looks so good.’ Oh god, what did I just say?

  Chris smiled a slow, shy smile. ‘Yeah, it’s good,’ he said.

  I waited to see if further assessment was forthcoming. Nope, nothing. This was a man of few words. But wait—‘Would you like some?’ he added.

  ‘Sure!’ I said. He might be a man of few words but at least he was a gentleman of few words. Even if he did let me babble away incessantly. Why can’t I stop talking tonight?

  ‘You know, you remind me a lot of my mum,’ he said quietly, putting his fork down and looking at me intently.

  ‘Your mum?’ I squeaked. ‘That’s a good thing, right?’ I wished the butterflies in my stomach would just buzz off and I could, at least, act like I was a normal member of the human race.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. There was that smile again. ‘My mum’s a real cracker. Big personality.’

  ‘And even bigger after a few drinks …,’ he added, thoughtfully tapping his chin. ‘But you’ll love her.’

  Now it was my turn to be silent. His mum was a ‘cracker,’ Which is why I reminded him of her? As first date compliments go, this wouldn’t exactly make my top ten.

  ‘Ah, good,’ I said vaguely. ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Yeah, good,’ he repeated and smiled shyly at me again before turning his attention back to his steak.

  And yet somehow, amid the muscles and the fact I reminded him of his mother, I started to fall for Chris that night. He was quiet and softly spoken but he was thoughtful and considered in his opinions. He was also fun and upbeat and had a wicked sense of humour. And by the time the downlights were lowered and the bar staff were wiping out glasses, I already knew I really liked this guy. A lot. And as I watched him across the table I’m afraid to say I thought: ‘I can’t wait to introduce you to my parents. They’re going to be so proud of me for once!’ (Not just because Chris was a Kiwi, which was cause for celebration in my family as my mum and all her family were born and bred in New Zealand.) Mostly, though, I knew they’d be thrilled for me when they met Chris because he was articulate and intelligent and far gentler than any guy I’d ever met before. I don’t know if it was because he was older than me (he was 26 to my very immature twenty), but he seemed incredibly self-assured and just so calm. We really couldn’t have been more different if we tried.

  As he walked me to the front door of my parents’ house later that evening, my hand was trembling slightly in his. What was wrong with me? He’s just a boy! I never get like this over a boy! And yet I felt like Frank Sinatra’s polka dots and moonbeams were swirling around my head. I floated up the front path, like one of those cartoon characters whose feet hover centimetres above the ground. Then, at the front door, Chris turned to me and without warning kissed me firmly but very gently on the mouth and I swooned.

  ‘So we’re official?’ he asked and the butterflies in my stomach took flight again.

  ‘We’re official,’ I smiled coyly, and then I leaned into those muscly arms.

  After saying goodbye to Chris I did my cartoon-float into the house, closed the front door behind me, then rested my back against it and shut my eyes while I relived the last few minutes. He kissed me! We’re official! I g
rinned to myself in the dark.

  ‘That’s it! This one’s a keeper!’ A disembodied voice screeched down the hallway, and my eyes snapped open in shock.

  ‘Mum!’ I admonished. ‘You scared the hell out of me!’

  She casually appeared out of the lounge room in her dressing gown. She must have been waiting up for me to get home.

  ‘What are you doing up anyway?’

  ‘Good night?’ she asked, smugly, ignoring my question.

  ‘Not bad,’ I said, doing my best to appear nonchalant and not as though she’d just taken ten years off my life in fright.

  ‘Not bad? This one’s a keeper,’ she forecast again.

  I stared at her like she was a crazy woman. ‘Mum, you’re mad. Chris and I have only just met. You and he have never met,’ I reminded her. ‘So how can you possibly know he’s the one.’

  ‘And anyway,’ I added, ‘I’m only twenty! I’m not interested in getting too serious. You’re being ridiculous, Mum.’

  She continued to grin. ‘Sure, sure, whatever you say. But I know love when I see it and you may as well hire a sky-writer with the news, the way it’s written all over your face.’

  I peered at her through the midnight darkness; her outline was barely discernible in the dim blue light of the flickering TV in the lounge. ‘You can see love, can you, Mum? Well, I can hardly see you, let alone love, so I’m going to bed, you crazy woman.’ And then I wandered off to my room, fumbling through the darkness and my crush.

  That was 9 January 2004. I can remember the date clearly because that was the day everything changed—markedly, and for the better. In the weeks following our first date, Chris and I spent almost every waking moment together. We hung out at Harbord Headland, overlooking Freshwater Beach, eating fish and chips; we went out for dinner, and we watched movies I can’t remember the names of (and probably couldn’t recall five minutes after the credits rolled, such was my new-crush delirium). We lost hours staring dopily into one another’s eyes. In short, we did all the things that had been done by millions of other couples all over the world, and yet everything felt so new with Chris. For me, I guess it was.

  Chris was unlike anyone I’d ever dated before and, on this score, my family and friends couldn’t have been happier. ‘He’s such a nice guy’ were the words I heard most often during those first few heady weeks of courtship as everyone around me fell hard for Chris, too.

  ‘What a nice boy!’ my mum exclaimed as he arrived to meet my parents bearing a bunch of beautiful blue irises for Mum.

  ‘He’s a nice guy this one, Krystal,’ was Dad’s assessment.

  ‘He’s just so nice!’ said my girlfriends, and my guy friends, and our neighbours, and the kid at the DVD store, and pretty much everyone else that came into contact with him. He’s nice. Oh, he’s nice. He’s a really nice guy.

  Chris was my prince charming who’d ridden up on his white horse (hell, he even worked at a horse farm!). So it’s no surprise, then, that barely two weeks after we’d met, I was in love with this nice guy myself.

  The strangest thing was he felt the same about me.

  One evening, when we were snuggled up on the couch watching some corny 1950s musical of my choosing—and when we’d still only been together for less than a month—Chris leaned over and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and looked me in the eyes and told me he loved me.

  He loved me? He loved me! Chris loved me and my heart soared. It did handstands. It did cartwheels. It did loop-the-loops until it made itself giddy. My heart was an all-singing, all-dancing musical tribute to Chris. Here I was, nuts about this guy, and it just so happened he loved me back.

  But wait, he loved me?

  On some level, I failed to understand how he could love the person that was me. Because at twenty years old I was, frankly, still a screw-up. I was still drinking excessively and I was still partying recklessly. I thought I was utterly unlovable. So how was it possible that this guy (this guy who was so nice) could see anything in me that he thought was worthy of love? It was a strange but wonderful mystery to me.

  But not for long.

  As it turned out Chris didn’t find everything about me lovable. It wasn’t long after our ‘I love you’ conversation that we had another that started with ‘I love you, but …’ and it descended from there.

  ‘Krystal,’ he said, ‘the drugs have to go.’ As did the cigarettes and the self-destructive behaviour, he told me. Chris was a clean-living, body-conscious, health-conscious guy and he wasn’t prepared to, as he put it, ‘kiss an ashtray’. Choose me or choose drugs, was the basic gist of things.

  Coming from anyone else, an ultimatum like this would barely have made a dent, but coming from Chris it cut me to my core. If the choice I faced was between Chris and hard living, well, then, I didn’t need to phone a friend to help me decide. I chose Chris and, practically overnight, I stopped taking drugs. I was lucky that it wasn’t something that was difficult for me to do; I simply chose to stop smoking pot and popping speed, and I did. No withdrawal symptoms, no struggle. In fact, I was surprised how little I missed getting high. Looking back now, with the clarity that comes with age and time (not to mention, the clarity that comes when you don’t have drugs racing around your bloodstream), I can see that this decision no doubt saved my life. And I have Chris to thank for that.

  So if we were close before, Chris and I were inseparable now. We took road trips to visit his mum on her farm at Five Day Creek, in the mountains halfway between Armidale and Kempsey in rural New South Wales. We dropped in on his dad at his beach house at Port Macquarie on the sunny mid-north coast. And somewhere between the two we decided we wanted to do more travelling together and so we booked a trip to Phuket, Thailand. The hitch? Both Chris and I were strapped for cash and struggling under the weight of our combined credit card debt. Hardly ideal for planning a holiday.

  It was at this point that Mum and Dad (very kindly) offered for Chris to move in and live with me in the tiny front room at home. The house would be a little squashy, sure, what with Chris and I and Mum and Dad and my younger brother and a couple of dogs, too. But a good way to save, nonetheless. And that’s how it came about that, after only about five months together, Chris turned up at my place in his little red Mazda, with his clothes on the back seat and his ironing board in the boot, and he simply never left.

  It was also around this time, though, that I started feeling unwell. Nothing major. It was just that sometimes I felt faint, and occasionally a little queasy; mostly I just felt a bit ‘off colour’. Plus, I was gaining weight despite my efforts to lose it. And as anyone who has struggled with eating will tell you, a few extra kilos can be traumatic at the best of times, but right now the timing couldn’t have been worse because my 21st birthday party was looming fast—and this was to be no ordinary party, people.

  My parents had stepped up to the plate yet again and had hired out Oceanworld Manly, an underwater aquarium on the waterfront at Manly Cove, inviting one hundred guests to help me celebrate alongside the sharks and the stingrays and whatever else was floating on by as we sipped on champagne and marvelled at the marine life. The balloons were ordered and the menus selected but, most important of all, Mum and I had found the most amazing dress for me to wear. After scouring the shops for months and months we’d discovered the most incredible gown. Think: slinky, gold glomesh. It had a low, plunging neckline, clung perfectly at my hips and then finished dramatically just below the knee. It was to die for. I felt like a Bond girl when I slipped it on and (after only a few minor alterations made at the time of purchase back in April) it fit me like a glove. Or so I thought.

  Now, in August, and just days before my big bash, I tried on my divine dress and discovered it was far too tight. The horror! Staring at the strangled, gold creature in the mirror I was mortified to see I had an enormous arse and a pot belly (and neither were figments of my hypercritical imagination).

  ‘Muuuum,’ I wailed. ‘I’m fat!’

  I was sta
nding in front of the full-length mirror in Mum and Dad’s bedroom while Mum trawled through her jewellery box looking for a pair of earrings for me to wear. I turned and glanced back at myself over my shoulder, in case this new angle suddenly made me drop 5 kilograms. It didn’t.

  ‘How did this happen? I look like a whale!’ All those gym sessions felt like a cruel joke.

  ‘I thought the only marine life at the party was going to be on the other side of the aquarium glass,’ Dad said dryly, but only once he was a safe distance away and exiting the room.

  ‘Muuuum!’ I sobbed and flung myself onto her bed.

  ‘Shhh, don’t listen to your father. You look beautiful,’ she said. ‘Although we might want to let that side seam out a little …’ And she reached for the phone to dial the dressmaker.

  Several days later I was flitting among my guests, who were flitting among the tropical fish at Oceanworld: my party was underway. The room was packed, the place was jumping and I was positively poured into that gold dress. It rubbed raw under my arms, it was tight across my stomach and it threatened to split open along the seams at my hips at any moment. Eight hundred bucks worth of glomesh had never felt so uncomfortable.

  ‘You look gorgeous, babe,’ Chris assured me, as I tugged at a side seam that was stretched to within an inch of its life. I grimaced, embarrassed that he was seeing me like this.

  And as I moved around the room that night in stiff, constricted movements I had that awful sensation that people were whispering behind my (helplessly exposed) back. What is she wearing? Where’s the rest of her dress? No more birthday cake for her! Of course I knew they weren’t saying these things—these were my closest friends and family, after all—but that’s what it felt like everyone was saying as my dress chafed angrily against my thighs.