The Crossroad Page 7

  We revived our old ‘can you do it’ challenges one night for a concert at the Enmore Theatre; I think Marilyn Manson was in it. We didn’t have enough money for tickets, so we started egging each other on about climbing on the roof and getting in from the top. We got on top of the theatre and could hear the place pumping. We found an open air vent and looked down through it – straight onto the stage of this concert! We climbed down into the railings and sat there having a good old time, passing a bottle of rum back and forth. Some rigging ropes were hanging near us, so we scaled down them. If you were in the crowd, you’d have been able to see this pair of feral-looking kids hanging above the stage. Security were watching the crowd, not us. We climbed down onto a little platform, sat there and enjoyed the music for a while. My mate eventually yelled out to one of the dudes on stage.

  That was it. Security saw us and went bananas. They couldn’t get to us initially. We were heckling them, these big solid bouncers trying to climb the ropes. They put up a ladder, which we pushed away. I said to my mate, ‘You reckon we can climb back up the ropes?’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ I followed his eyes. The bouncers were on the platform.

  They put us in arm locks, took us backstage and started throwing us around. We were saying, ‘Slow down, we’re harmless, we’re not doing anything.’ But they wanted to take it to the next level. The struggle started to escalate into a full-blown brawl. My mate carried a knife with him and didn’t want to get caught with it. He started thrashing around and fighting the bouncers, and threw his knife away to hide it. Some kind of supervisor came down and told us to stay there. He was going to call the cops.

  We said, ‘What are you gunna charge us with?’

  ‘Breaking and entering.’

  ‘The place was open, we just came in.’

  While this discussion was going on, the bouncers made the mistake of taking their eye off us. They expected we’d do as we were told and wait passively for the cops, but we noticed that the exit door was right next to us. Suddenly we popped it open and got out onto Enmore Road. There was no way they were going to catch us. We ticked it off as another successful mission.

  *

  One night during that first year in Sydney, I had a dream that I saw Mum with a soft blue neon light behind her, sort of hovering in the sky. I could see her mouthing words but I couldn’t hear her. I was saying, What are you trying to tell me? And finally I could hear. She was saying, Wake up, Mark. Wake up, Mark. Over and over again. I said, in the dream, I am awake – what do you want to tell me? She insisted, Wake UP, Mark.

  I woke up. It was 5.30 am. It was a vivid enough dream for me to write it down in a notebook. I thought about it, and took the meaning to be that I should wake up to myself and stop trying to be someone other than who I was. I was struggling with college. Was this really me? Did I really want to go down this line? And I was hanging out with a crew of people who were a bit fucked in the head. Maybe on some level she was trying to tell me that. Anyway, I didn’t think much more about the dream until the next year.

  In the Christmas holidays at the end of 1997, I went back home via Auntie Margaret’s place in Newcastle. I might have looked in my element in Camperdown, but visiting the family created a stir. I had a long Mohawk dyed black with streaks of green, tied back, and my head shaved down the sides. I had some piercings, including one in my nose. When I was at Margaret’s, one of her grandchildren, my nephew Liam, kept staring at the ring and asking me if it hurt and asking, ‘Can you blow your nose?’ With my ripped jeans and tattered singlets and hair, I looked like the creature from the black lagoon.

  From my appearance and behaviour, it was obvious to Mum what kind of stuff I was up to. I was bored in Dorrigo and hung out with Lister in the cellar. Mum must have been concerned that I was losing my way. I saw Chris Watt again on that visit, and he was still persistent, still weird. Auntie Margaret said she’d only met him once, at his mother’s place, and he acted disconcertingly: he was sitting off to the side, outside the circle, and she offered to make a space to let him in. He said no, he preferred being outside, as if he wanted to observe everybody and not be a part of the conversation. Given that he was more or less hosting the visitors, Margaret found that unnerving, but she didn’t say anything to Mum.

  As for getting myself back on track, I was too full of bravado to be told by anyone else. I had to reach my outer limits for myself. When I went back to Sydney, there was a night I went out in North Sydney and got so drunk that I went to get on the train to go south and ended up two stations north. When I got off, I fell between the train and the platform and took all the skin off my shins, legs and chin. I had one arm on the train and one on the platform and was stuck between them, and the train was about to move. This is the type of thing you read about in the paper: a young drunken idiot getting himself killed by a train. Luckily for me, a guard saw me and stopped the train. I climbed up onto the platform and fell back vomiting, bleeding, blind drunk. The train took off and I was still lying there.

  In a haze, and giggling to myself, I got on a train heading south and got off at Wynyard, in the middle of the CBD. I was tipping over garbage bins and couldn’t find my way out of the business area. I passed out somewhere, and while I was unconscious I shat and pissed myself. When I came to, I was abusing people. I was just a wreck. I guess I’d achieved what I wanted, which was to find out how far I could push it.

  I made it to Town Hall to get a NightRide bus, but the driver wouldn’t let me on. I had to stumble the couple of kilometres to Camperdown, and got there as the sun was coming up. I crashed out in my bed, and woke up at five in the afternoon with blood all over me, smelling of piss and shit, clothes all torn, skin off my face and legs. I thought, I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep this up. When I thought of the night before, I knew how close I’d been to ending up squished on those train tracks. And I’d been on my own, no one looking after me, I’d lost the people I’d started the night with and probably didn’t really know them anyway. It was all pretty dire.

  The house in Camperdown started breaking up. The girls had a huge argument and we all went our separate ways. Melissa, who was the only one I’d stayed on good terms with, moved back up to the north coast, and I moved into a share house in nearby Chippendale.

  That night when I’d nearly killed myself and woken up in my own shit was a wake-up call for me. Years later in Afghanistan, making a split-second decision in that ambush, I didn’t realise I’d reached a crossroad that was going to change my life. But in Sydney, sore, aching and embarrassed, it didn’t take a genius to work out that I was standing at some sort of junction. Keep going the way I way I was headed and it was going to end badly for me. I made the conscious decision to follow a different road. I stopped boozing hard and partying, and began to get healthy, swimming at the Victoria Park pool on Broadway every morning. Just like in my last year of school, one extreme was followed by an equally extreme counter-reaction. I got a job as a kitchen hand at the Bathers’ Pavilion in Balmoral, where one of my new flatmates was an apprentice chef. The other flatmates were a musician and a Dutch exchange student. It was quite a different house from Camperdown, where everyone had done everything together. Here it was four guys each doing their own thing, no communal cooking or cleaning. You just looked after yourself. I went for weeks sometimes without seeing them beyond a ‘Hey’ in the hallway. It sounds like a cold place, but it was just what I needed at that time.

  I began cutting out of college early to work double shifts at the restaurant. Because I was cleaning myself up, I was enjoying my new spartan lifestyle. To economise on food, I took the big bags of bread rolls they threw out after each night at the restaurant, and some milk from the fridge. I was making my life simple and healthy.

  Mum teased me that I only called if I needed money, and I took it a bit personally, so I wasn’t calling her as often as I should have. One morning in April, just after my nineteenth birthday, I woke u
p with a funny feeling in my gut that I should call her, just to see how she was going.

  ‘Hello?’

  It wasn’t Mum’s voice on the phone, which took me aback. ‘Who’s that?’ I said.

  ‘Is that you, Mark? It’s Jo here.’ Jo Beaumont was our neighbour and Mum’s closest friend.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I said. ‘Why are you answering the phone?’

  ‘Your mum’s not here,’ Jo said. ‘You don’t know where she is, do you?’

  ‘I thought she was at home.’

  ‘Well, we’re not sure where she is. We think she’s missing.’

  ‘What?’

  Jo explained that the police were at the house, and a few things warranted them taking a look. She started explaining it quite calmly, but soon got extremely upset and began crying. ‘Mark, they think something’s happened to your mum. She’s missing and nobody knows where she is.’

  I don’t remember how the conversation ended. My heart was thumping in my throat. I said, ‘I’ll ring back later.’

  I went to work at the Bathers’, just trying to normalise things. When I get home, I thought, Mum will have turned up and everything will be okay.

  When I got home, there was a stack of messages waiting for me, none of them good. One was from Auntie Margaret. I rang her, and she said she and Uncle Ken were planning to drive up to Dorrigo. I asked her to wait for me. I’d be on the next train to Newcastle.

  On the train, I felt crisp and rational. I could remove myself from my anxiety and analyse the situation. It was uncharacteristic of Mum to do this without telling anyone, but maybe she’d gone camping. She often went away for weekends. In fact, that same weekend, I’d heard, she’d been planning to fly up to Queensland to visit a friend.

  The alarm had first been raised when Mum didn’t arrive on her flight, and her friend called Dorrigo. A family friend, a young guy named Paul, my godparents’ son, who’d stayed at the house a couple of nights a week because he was working as a builder at the pub, had arrived there to drop off his stuff. Mum’s car and Lister were there and the house was open, but Mum was nowhere to be seen. Paul had rung Jo and she’d called the police.

  When I got to Margaret’s place, she was in tears, which confronted me with a truth my cold rationalising could no longer ward off. Something bad was going on. Margaret poured out the facts. There wasn’t much chance Mum had left the house to go on holidays. She would have left Lister in kennels or with friends. Bits of information were coming from here and there, but we tried not to make too much of it before we found out more facts. We left for Dorrigo, a four- to five-hour drive, and went straight to the police station. Brent was already in Dorrigo. The policeman, who’d stayed out at the property all night, sat us down and told us they’d found blood in the house, on the staircase and in the garage. He didn’t tell us this at the time, but he’d found a bone fragment in the driveway as well. Due to the blood at the scene, the house being unlocked, and the dog and the car being left there, along with signs of a struggle in the house, the police suspected Mum had been murdered. I just sat there, feeling numb but ready to explode at the same time. Margaret was sobbing and holding tightly to my arm.

  We went up to the Beaumonts’ place, and this was where Chris Watt’s name came up. He hadn’t even crossed my mind. But the police had told Brent and Jo they suspected Chris was involved, because of what had happened five days before Mum disappeared – Anzac Day.

  In honour of Dad, Mum had marched on Anzac Day and laid some flowers at the memorial. After the ceremony, Mum went back to the Beaumonts’ and unloaded about recent developments between her and Chris. She got quite upset as she spoke to Jo. Mum had told Chris she didn’t want to see him or have anything to do with him any more. She told Jo she felt stupid about giving him the wrong idea, but she’d only wanted to be friends with him, and it hadn’t dawned on her until recently that he’d thought the relationship was a lot more than it was. She’d finally told him it wasn’t going any further.

  He’d started pestering her then, ringing her up and saying, ‘I’ve invested so much in this relationship, you can’t end it.’ She said, ‘It’s not about how much money you’ve invested, is it?’ He’d been mowing her lawns and doing other odd jobs, and even though she’d asked him not to, he’d done them anyway. He’d lent her a lot of household bits and pieces, and she told Jo she was leaving the stuff on her back step with a note to him saying he could take it back if he wanted. Mum hadn’t wanted to go home, in case he turned up to get his things. She didn’t want to be there for any confrontation. She just wanted a clean break. Five days after Anzac Day, Jo saw Chris’s distinctive bright-yellow car at our house. Nobody had seen Mum from that day on.

  Brent and I stayed at the Beaumonts’ for a night. The police let us know that Chris had gone to the Gold Coast. He had been visiting friends near Armidale, at Uralla. He’d told them he was going to the Gold Coast, but they couldn’t contact him. His house in Bellingen had been left in a hurry. His neighbours had seen him show up early on the morning of 30 April, dishevelled, and he’d ignored them when they’d said hello. He was going to visit his son Jon, who was in hospital on the Gold Coast. Chris’s parents lived in Grafton and it was likely that he took the back road to there from Coffs Harbour and onward to the Gold Coast, where his daughter Christine lived.

  Brent and I said we were going to go up there and flog him and find out what he had to do with it. Margaret and Jo were saying, ‘We don’t know if it’s him. Let the police do their thing.’

  Frustrated, I stomped around the place. A lot of people were coming around to the Beaumonts’ and I started having similar feelings to when we’d lost Dad. I wanted to find some mates and have a drink and get away from all this overwhelming interest. It was suffocating, everyone being in the one place moping around and talking about it. I wanted to do something. Lister came with me everywhere. We went down to the pub for a few beers. The publican was nice and let me have Lister in to lie by the fire.

  People were going in search parties into the bush down the back roads between Dorrigo and Bellingen and to the Bellinger River. Then we got the news. Chris had been found in the car park of an RSL club in south-east Queensland. He’d taken some pills and left two suicide notes, neither of which said anything about Mum. To say he took the coward’s way out is to get across barely a fraction of the anger I felt, and still feel.

  Brent was the same. We were saying we should have gone to the Gold Coast and got him while he was still alive, and were mad at ourselves for not doing so. He might have already committed suicide by then anyway, but at least we’d have done something. ‘If he hadn’t done that,’ I said to Brent, ‘he’d have ended up dead anyway if I’d got my hands on him.’ Brent agreed. That was how enraged we were.

  I still feel that fury to this day and would still do that to him. It’s quite violent, but I would make him suffer. What did she ever do? She did nothing, nothing at all. I have no words to describe him. There’s no lower human act than to take an innocent person’s life and then be such a coward as to take your own.

  We stayed in Dorrigo for three weeks, driving around looking for her. People were walking the banks of the rivers. Notices went out in the papers asking for information, and there was a bit on the TV news.

  The police ended up digging up Chris’s wife’s body, suspecting there might have been some foul play. In a cruel irony, Mum had only befriended Chris in the first place because his wife had died, and someone had told Mum that it might be good therapy to share experiences. Chris’s wife had hanged herself, but there were parts of the story that hadn’t sounded right. She’d bought material for sewing and done her ironing that day. It was uncharacteristic of people committing suicide to do those sorts of things. But nothing could ever be proven, and either way it wasn’t going to help Mum.

  It can be hard to believe genuinely nice people exist, but Mum was truly one of those types.
One of my friends said, ‘This sort of thing doesn’t happen to people like Bernadette. She was supposed to grow old and sit on a rocking chair on the front porch watching her grandchildren run around.’ That’s right. She was an authentically good person and deserved the best. One of the things that really gutted me was that she always trusted people, and it was that trusting personality that brought about her end. I think it changed my perception of how to treat people, and whether I wanted to or not, I would be wary of others because of what happened to her.

  It is kind of sad that we took her for granted. You tend to just assume that your parents will always be there. The older I got the more she would have to put up with. Especially after Dad died and I was going through those couple of wayward years.

  She was happy for me when I moved into the room under the house. I was smoking cigarettes down there, stupidly thinking she would not be able to smell it. She caught me off guard one morning before school. I came upstairs to have breakfast and just out of the blue and in complete calmness she said to me, ‘if you’re going to smoke that’s fine, but at least go outside so it doesn’t make the whole house stink.’ Silence. I must have had a bit of a stunned look on my face, then just said something like, ‘Uhhh, okay . . . thanks!’ She was good like that. I know she didn’t like the fact that I did it but knew I would do it anyway, so she compromised and that relaxed the feeling of tension in the house, for me anyway.