Unconditional Love Read online

  Soon Angela was a regular visitor to our house, and Kathy and I would have sleepovers at hers. We became a tight trio. Angela had fair hair, blue eyes, a voluptuous body and a Roman nose that I loved and she hated. I thought it gave her face character but she got it changed as soon as her parents gave their permission. Angela was very smart and so funny she could make me weep with laughter. Her dad was a gentle, friendly man who only spoke Italian. Her mum, who had grown up in Australia, spoke both Italian and English. The Borellis lived on ten acres, half a mile from our house. They had cows, chickens, cats, one horse, a wonderful old house and a barn.

  Angela went to the movies far more than we did. She also had a TV, which my parents had vetoed, hoping (in vain) that not having a television in the house would encourage us to be more conscientious about our homework. Angela told Kathy and me the storylines of the movies and TV shows we had missed out on watching. She was a natural storyteller, with tremendous panache, and went into great detail. Kathy and I would listen for hours. Sometimes, the three of us would make up our own radio plays, comedies, complete with sound effects and music. We recorded our productions, then listened back to the tape recorder, utterly amused. Our friendship was sustained by keeping each other in laughing fits as often as possible.

  As the three of us were quite good at drawing, we created satirical comic books about each other, which invariably included our most recent embarrassments. There was always something to be mortally embarrassed by. For example, I had a crush on the Irish actor Richard Harris, whom I’d seen playing Oliver Cromwell in a movie at school. He was already forty when he played Cromwell. His Camelot days were behind him. Kathy and Angela kept dry-retching when I talked about how handsome he was. I loved him so much I even hunted down a recording he had made of his poetry. It was called ‘I, in the Membership of My Days’.

  ‘What does he mean when he says, “I am the empty vessels floating on my head”?’ Angela would cackle cruelly.

  ‘Shut up!’ I would shout. ‘You just don’t understand great poetry!’

  Angela’s parents had a small library, which included a collection of stories by the Brontë sisters. Angela had read them and said they were good. In the summer of 1972, Kathy tore through Wuthering Heights while I devoured Jane Eyre. I decided Mr Rochester was my ideal man, and she decided hers was Heathcliff. Angela said we were crazy, and declared that David Bowie was, in fact, the ideal man.

  ‘Who is David Bowie?’ I asked her. I was still listening to classical music. Angela soon talked me into listening to Bowie’s music. It changed my life, of course.

  By this time I was wearing a training bra, a stretchy thing that Mum got me because my ‘budding’ was finally becoming obvious. All the girls in Grade Six were wearing training bras. Boys loved to come up behind us and flick the strap through our school uniforms. During recess one day, the boy who lived across the road from us came over and sat down next to me. I will call him Nick. He was a nice boy who didn’t make gross jokes. He asked me if I wanted to ‘go with’ him. I was a bit surprised. I was also curious about what that meant. Looking around the schoolyard at the girls and boys who were ‘going with’ each other, it seemed to mean holding hands and declaring temporary ownership of each other. It meant you were both somehow more special than all the unattached girls and boys.

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  He put his arm around me. Then he asked me what bra size I was wearing.

  ‘Thirty-two A,’ I replied, wondering why he needed to know that. Thirty-two A was the smallest size available for girls my age.

  ‘You don’t look like a thirty-two A to me,’ he said, ‘but you’ve got big shoulders. That’s probably why.’

  I felt the old familiar sting of not being up to scratch. My unwomanly body had disappointed. I was no longer a fabulous, flat-chested twelve-year-old, but a mediocre, tiny-breasted pre-teen. I was not a real thirty-two A. I was an imposter.

  That afternoon, a teacher sent me on an errand to deliver a box of books to Nick’s class. I saw him in the front row and smiled at him. He didn’t smile back; he looked away. By the end of school that day, Nick had dropped me. He said he didn’t want to go with me after all. It had all been a joke. I was hurt. I felt inadequate. I wanted breasts. Kathy told me to forget Nick. It had been a four-hour relationship. I still had her and Angela. Thank heavens for sisters and girlfriends.

  5

  In our life, there is a single colour, as on an artist’s palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the colour of love.

  MARC CHAGALL

  Mum wanted her children to attend Vermont High School. The school placed enormous importance on arts and music. Mum was so excited about me going to the school where she taught, she even plastered my hair into some strange kiss curls in front of each ear on my first day. It made her happy. As soon as I was out of her sight, I went into the girls’ toilets, wet my hair and did my best to eradicate the ringlets.

  One of the first girls I made friends with was Ellen, a pale, blonde waif who played the violin. We went to orchestra practice together, and talked about boys together. Well, she liked to talk about boys. I mostly listened. She was funny, and smart. She used to go to the bathroom a lot, and spend ages in there. Some of the other girls and I started making up jokes about how long Ellen took in the bathroom. One day in Biology, she asked to go to the bathroom and I sniggered, just before I heard her whisper, ‘Oh no.’ Her right hand was curling in on itself and then her elbow pressed against her side. Ellen went down on her knees, then fell onto her back. Kids started shouting.

  The teacher saw her on the floor. ‘Everyone stand back!’ she instructed. ‘Push the desks away to give her some space.’ Ellen was convulsing. It was as if an invisible hand was shaking her. Foam was coming out of her mouth and her eyes were rolled back in her head. The teacher placed a wooden ruler between her teeth and laid Ellen on her side. She held her that way until she stopped shaking and lay still, apparently asleep. The teacher explained that Ellen had a condition called epilepsy. She said to ignore Ellen while she slept on the floor for a while, but it was difficult to get back to classwork. We kept looking at Ellen. Why didn’t the nurse come and get her?

  After a few minutes she woke, picked herself up and sat back in her desk, embarrassed. Later, she confided in me that she had been trying to hide her epilepsy all year. She would get a strange feeling in her head, a warning that a seizure was about to start. After that, she had about a minute to get to the bathroom, where she could hide in a stall until it was over. But now everybody knew. The teachers decided it was much safer for Ellen not to hide away. If she had a seizure in the classroom, we could make sure she was safe and didn’t hurt herself. I felt like a mean little bitch, making fun of Ellen’s bathroom visits. No one ever joked about her again.

  In my second year of high school I started being the target of bullying. Katie O’Connell (not her real name) was scary. I was a weedy nerd who played the cello, and she had long blonde hair, muscular, tanned legs and extraordinary athletic abilities. She started telling everyone that I was a smartarse and a pervert. She truly hated me. One day a friend of mine, Lizzie, and I were getting books out of our lockers, when Katie came up to Lizzie and hit her in the head.

  ‘What the hell?’ I said. ‘Leave her alone, Katie!’ My locker was directly beneath Lizzie’s, and I was crouching down to retrieve my books. Katie kicked me hard in the small of my back. I spun around and scratched her legs, like a crazed cat. Enraged, Katie hurled herself on top of me, grabbed my hair and started bashing my head onto the concrete. It really hurt. A crowd of students gathered to watch. My only instinct was to crawl, inch by inch, across to the water bubblers and cower beneath them. Once I was curled into a defeated foetal position, Katie finally stopped hitting me. I slithered out and stood up, smoothing down my dusty uniform.

  ‘I think I’ve had enough,’ I said in a shaky voice. I was trying to sound cool but I wasn’t fooling anyone.

  Katie sneere
d at me. ‘You tell anyone about this,’ she said, ‘and I’ll kill you.’

  After school, I waited in the teachers’ car park for Mum to give me a lift home. I tried to keep my face averted while she unlocked the doors, but as I got into the front passenger seat, she saw my battle wounds.

  ‘What happened to you?’ she asked, her eyes wide.

  ‘Nothing. It’s fine, Mum,’ I replied.

  Her eyes narrowed into a protective mother expression. She was already planning her revenge. She just needed a name.

  ‘I don’t want you doing anything, Mum,’ I said. ‘Nothing happened to me, okay?’

  ‘I can see big lumps on your forehead. Tell me what happened.’

  ‘Look, Mum, I can’t. The girl who did this said she’ll kill me if I tell anyone.’

  Her reaction was immediate. ‘I’m not going to get the student into trouble,’ she said in a calm voice, ‘but I am taking you out of this school.’

  The next day, Kathy, Greg and I were attending Pembroke High School in Mooroolbark. The opposite of Vermont, Pembroke was a progressive school where they were experimenting with ideas about education. There were no uniforms. Students called the teachers by their first names and could smoke in designated areas. Teachers talked about politics, feminism and how to save the environment. My father scoffed and called it a hippy school run by lefties, but Mum was adamant. I was not going back to Vermont while Katie O’Connell was there. We were thrilled by the move. Angela Borelli was at Pembroke. Now the three best friends could all be at school together.

  My pastoral care teacher at Pembroke was Mrs Eldridge (not her real name). She was twenty-four, smart and kind, and insisted we call her Jane, but I was in awe of her. Calling her by her first name was unthinkable. She taught French, English and Drama, and reminded me of Miss Honey in the Roald Dahl story Matilda. I was supposed to visit her once a week to talk about my personal problems. I didn’t have any problems yet, but I went anyway. She took an interest in me and I developed a bit of a crush on her. I thought I might be gay. I discussed this with Angela, who asked me if I wanted to have sex with Mrs Eldridge.

  ‘Umm, no,’ I said. I thought a bit more. Did I? No. I wanted to worship her from afar as the ideal woman. ‘I don’t,’ I added.

  ‘Then you’re probably not gay, just obsessive,’ said Angela.

  I was, however, still confused by my intense emotions, so I talked my feelings over with Mrs Eldridge herself.

  She was not at all fazed. ‘Jocelyn, there are different kinds of love,’ she said, ‘and for some reason society insists on putting love into neat little boxes. It’s okay to love outside the box.’

  Around this time Angela, Kathy and I went to see Jesus Christ Superstar, the rock opera composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. We went to the Palais Theatre in St Kilda and I was blown away. Not long after that, Angela bought a recording, made by The Who and The London Symphony Orchestra, of a production of Tommy, a rock opera written by Pete Townshend about a deaf, dumb and blind boy who becomes the messiah of a new religion. I loved the album, not least because Richard Harris had a cameo. Kathy, Angela and I listened to the record over and over, learning the songs by heart. It inspired me to compose my own rock opera. I wrote six songs that told the story of a boy who was bullied until he killed himself. Cheerful stuff, but composing music filled me with happiness. Mum was impressed and made me play the whole thing through while she taped it. She took the tape-recording to Mrs Eldridge, who immediately decided we should stage a school production. We called my rock opera Top Dog.

  At assembly, Mrs Eldridge announced that we were holding auditions. I needed two boys and three girls. Only girls turned up to the auditions, so I cast my usual leading lady, Kathy, as the male bully (Billy Stan) and another girl as the victim (Peter). Two girls were cast as the girlfriends of Billy and Peter. Angela didn’t want to sing any solos, so I put her into the show as part of the chorus of onlookers. Mrs Eldridge mentored me and, before I knew it, I was a director. Top Dog’s running time was twenty minutes. We staged it in front of the entire school. My proud parents came to the performance. Dad got angry with some parents who were sniggering and told them to shut up. Soon after, Top Dog was invited to be part of a combined schools drama festival at Melbourne University. The night before, I felt a gnawing pain in my lower abdomen. It got worse. I lay on my bed, groaning.

  ‘I feel like I’m dying,’ I moaned to Kathy, who stared at me with big, frightened eyes.

  The next morning, there was blood in my undies. The dreaded menstruation. Thus began a decades-long, monthly relationship with blood and pain. Mum gave me a speech about being a woman. I was not interested. I was so nervous about staging Top Dog at Melbourne University, I could barely breathe. But it all went smoothly. Mum and Grandma Wood sat proudly in the audience and congratulated Kathy and me afterwards. I was thrilled by the excitement of putting on a show. It was my first taste of directing, and I was hooked.

  In 1975 the movie of Tommy, starring The Who’s Roger Daltrey, was released. Kathy, Angela and I raced to our local cinema to see it. I was disappointed that Richard Harris was not in the cast, but the film was wild, my first introduction to the extraordinary British director Ken Russell. I became an instant fan and sought out opportunities to see his other films, either on TV or at arthouse cinemas. I watched The Music Lovers, loosely based on the life of Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, on late-night television. I had been a fan of Tchaikovsky ever since Grandma Wood took me to see a ballet performance of The Nutcracker when I was ten. She bought me a record of the music and I played it over and over, until Greg hid it from me.

  The Music Lovers is full of wild excess, but is visually stunning. I was intrigued to learn from the film that Tchaikovsky was gay, and that his wife, Antonina, brilliantly played by Glenda Jackson, ended up in a mental institution. Next I watched Russell’s film about Franz Liszt, Lisztomania, which also starred Roger Daltrey in the title role, but Kathy, Angela and I were traumatised by the depiction of Franz Liszt’s giant penis. I thought the movie was insane; it put me off Ken Russell’s movies until I saw Women in Love, his superb adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s novel.

  Unlike me, my big brother Greg was a popular teenager. Everyone loved him, girls, boys, teachers. Whatever he put his hand to, he was good at. He could sketch and paint, compose songs on his guitar and write poems and stories. He was good at carpentry. He got excellent marks at school. But when he was seventeen he became rebellious and started talking back to Dad. He stopped going to classes. He said there was no point.

  When Mum found out he was growing marijuana on the roof of our house, she threw out the plants. Dad shouted at Greg and started treating him with contempt. It was horrible to witness. Kathy, Mum and I watched helplessly as their relationship fell apart. Greg stopped believing in himself.

  I remember seeing Greg crossing the school grounds when I knew he was supposed to be in the gym, sitting his exams with all the other Year Eleven students. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked him. ‘The exam can’t be finished yet!’

  ‘There’s no point, Joss,’ he said, his eyes dark.

  I didn’t understand, and I was sad for him. He was racked with self-doubt, and I didn’t know how to help him. He dropped out of school. Dad was furious and called Greg a no-hoper. Mum made him enrol at night school to finish his education. She tried to defend Greg when Dad yelled at him. Once he even pushed Greg down the stairs, which frightened Kathy and me. We loved Greg and Dad and hated to see them fighting. Greg took off for weeks at a time, and once disappeared for six months.

  When I was fifteen, I developed a crush on an older boy at school. His name was Peter. He had long, blond surfie hair and looked a bit like a rock star. In my mind, anyway. We never spoke but would exchange fleeting smiles as we passed each other in the school grounds. Peter finally talked to me the day after I chopped off my long hair into a pixie cut.

  He came up to me and tickled the back of my neck. ‘Why’d you cut
your hair? I really liked it long.’

  Dammit! Why did I cut my hair? Then he told me I was still beautiful. No boy had ever said anything like that to me. Instantly, I was hopelessly under his power. Everything else in my life became unimportant. I stopped practising the piano and lost interest in lessons. One day, I was with Peter in his backyard pool: I didn’t have a swimsuit with me, so had stripped down to a T-shirt and undies. Mum appeared out of nowhere and ordered me out of the pool.

  ‘You have a piano lesson in ten minutes,’ she fumed, taking in my wet T-shirt look and remaining remarkably calm.

  I was startled and embarrassed, but tried to stay cool in front of Peter. ‘Mum, can’t I miss it this once?’ I begged.

  ‘No!’ she shouted. ‘Out of the pool! Now!’

  I said goodbye to Peter and slunk away.

  Angela and Kathy were annoyed because now I spent all my time with Peter. He was a sweet boy. He made iced coffee and hamburgers for me when I went around to his house after school. His garage had been turned into a billiards room and teenage hangout. Peter taught me to play pool while Led Zeppelin blasted on the stereo. Sometimes he would imitate his hero, Robert Plant, and sing along using the cue as his microphone. He could play ‘Stairway to Heaven’ on the guitar. He wanted to do more than kiss, but I wasn’t ready.

  After three months, Peter got tired of waiting for me to agree to sex and dumped me. It was my first broken heart. I remember sitting by the enormous fireplace in our lounge room at Mooroolbark and Mum putting her arm around me. ‘I know it doesn’t seem possible right now,’ she said, ‘but this pain will pass.’ As usual, she was right.

  There was another boy at Pembroke High who seemed interesting, but not as boyfriend material. John McAll was skinny and looked like an angry poet. He was one of the school ‘toughs’ who hung out by our locker shed. We would all run the gauntlet of their scathing commentary whenever we went to our lockers. The leader of the group was a man-sized boy known as X. His real name was Darren Erickson. John seemed to be his second in command. He was different from the other boys in his group. While they jeered and made vile comments, John remained aloof, a hint of amusement on his face. He seemed too thin to be a ‘tough’, but he was the clever one who made the others laugh. He was a mystery.