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  I can say that I had no concept of how I was making her feel by taking off on a Friday down the coast to go partying and not showing up till Sunday night, having not talked to her all weekend and her not knowing where I was or what I was up to. It is hard because I snapped out of that selfishness and became aware of how much I had troubled her only shortly before her tragic death. In being patient and not aggressive, it helped me and I owe her my life for that. I think if she had been any other way – if she had intervened or forced me – then I believe it would have pushed me further away. It would have been difficult for her too because Dad had been a hard taskmaster and had anger problems. There were probably times when she needed to use his approach in dealing with us.

  My memories of her are centred around a feeling that she made everything okay and safe. Her positive attitude, no matter what was happening, really rubbed off on us. She would encourage us to try our best and remind us that we could achieve whatever we wanted. Mum had a special way of making us kids feel as if there was nothing we couldn’t do. Even though Dad was great to have fun with, if it wasn’t done his way it was wrong. You had to perform with Dad or he would explode. Mum had a better way of letting us figure it out for ourselves without making us feel useless if we didn’t. A unique talent.

  Before she disappeared, Mum had been planning Brent’s twenty-first birthday party. We decided to go ahead with it. Jo cleaned the house, and Brent and I moved back in. I was still separating myself from it all emotionally. It was only on the first night we moved back in that I shed a tear. To this day I haven’t done it again. There’s no mistaking how emotional it is for me, but I’ve never let it overwhelm me. Maybe I don’t know where I’d end up if I did.

  We made the best we could of Brent’s twenty-first at the Beaumonts’ place. Brent’s mates from uni were all there, trying to keep it from being an understandably sombre occasion. While we were at the house together he and I had a lot of talking to do, and one night we had a big argument. He was lecturing me about how I had to get myself back on the rails, and I snapped, ‘This is just like when Dad died. You’re trying to tell me what to do again. It’s not like that any more. Where were you when I was in Sydney doing all this stuff and getting in trouble and going down this slippery slope? Where were you then? If you’re such a good brother who looks after his little brother, where were you then?’

  The look on his face showed that he hadn’t realised I felt that way. It upset him and he took it pretty hard. I didn’t understand how badly I was hurting him – then again, when you’re arguing with your brother, you want to hurt him.

  There were signs that we were cracking up again the way we had when Dad died, but this time it was different. After we simmered down, we agreed that there was only the two of us now. We had to look after each other.

  That was the closest I came to getting really emotional about it. It wasn’t quite a pact, just an understanding that we’d stay in touch and be good to each other and not grow apart. Years later, Brent and I can go for long periods without talking to each other, but when we’re together we don’t argue any more. He’s my best friend. And for fifteen years we’ve been all that’s left of our family, only the two of us to look after each other.

  FIVE

  We had a service a couple of weeks later, to put a plaque on a rock in the park in Dorrigo. A lot of townspeople were there, to show their horror at what had happened and their respect for Mum. There were a few seats for family down the front, but I didn’t want to go there with people looking at me, so I stayed off to the side with Lister.

  Joan came over and said, ‘Come and sit with the family.’

  ‘I want to be here,’ I said. ‘This is where I want to stand.’

  She took the hint and went back to her seat. The spooky thing was, as she went to sit down she fell off the back of her chair. Margaret to this day says Mum was there and tipped Joan off as a last message.

  The service was upsetting, but in a different way from Dad’s. This time there was nothing we could hang on to. Dad had died and we put him into the ground. With Mum, one day she was there and the next she was gone. I never had a doubt what had happened; Chris had no other reason to commit suicide. There would be two coronial inquests, eventually finding that he’d probably murdered her, but we didn’t need that for confirmation. Years later, after the second coronial inquest and thanks to advances in DNA technology, it was deemed that the blood found in the back of his car was Mum’s. To this day she’s never been found – no remains, no personal effects, nothing. An empty absolute nothingness. It was not only a brutal and cruel thing to do, but unthinkably self-centred. We were at the park trying to think about Mum and bring back all our good memories, but that was hard to do when I was so stirred up by anger and disgust for that person.

  I hung around for another week, in no hurry to go back to college. Mrs Hogan, my high school art teacher, had been at the service. She came up and made the mistake of asking, ‘How’s school?’

  Grunting, I said I’d decided I didn’t need that shit now. This was the second parent I’d lost. I’d thought about it on my way up with Margaret and Ken. The last thing I wanted was to continue with a degree I didn’t like. I told Mrs Hogan I was going to travel and see things. In those days, there was a bit of a battle going on, with plenty of friends and family encouraging me to stick with my education. No way in hell. I had a kind of unbreakable determination now. It didn’t yet have any positive direction, but I knew with certainty what I didn’t want to do.

  I went down to Sydney and saw the management of the college. They said, ‘You’ve only got three months to go, why don’t you stick with it? We can work something out.’ I said, politely but firmly, ‘It’s not going to happen. I don’t want to do this any more.’

  After a week in Sydney, I found I couldn’t cope and headed straight back to Dorrigo, moving into the house. Brent went back to Newcastle, where soon after he met Kate; they would go on to marry and have a beautiful family. We all deal with these things in our own way, and my way, as it had been after Dad’s death, was to seek out my loyal old mates.

  A lot of them were in Dorrigo, and once again they became my surrogate family. To escape, I dived into the drinking and partying with them. But as they say, you can never step into the same river twice. The guys were still living the same way, doing the same thing. For me, it was fun at first but had a shorter lifespan. Things could get out of hand too easily, and the thrill wasn’t the same as when we were sixteen.

  One night down in Coffs Harbour, we were drinking a slab of VBs on a roof over the pedestrian mall in the centre of town, chucking bottles down to smash on the pavers and scare the people walking past. The next minute, we saw coppers in leather jackets climbing up towards us. We sprinted across the tarmac and climbed down the side of the wall, but they caught us and gave us ‘move on’ notices.

  Later that night, we were back in the mall. A drunk man with his arm in a cast came up to my mate, who was a 100-kilogram tuna fisherman, also pretty drunk, and started asking him for a cigarette. My mate said no, and the bloke took a swing. My mate took a haymaker back at him, but missed and fell over. We were standing there laughing at him. It was pretty funny that he’d been so pissed he couldn’t even lay a hand on a pissed bloke with a broken arm.

  But then the man with the cast kicked him in the face. We just ramped up. The bloke took off. After my fitness kick in Sydney, I ran him down pretty easily. I was just wrestling him, and he clipped me in the face with his cast. I lost it. I grabbed his hair and drove my knee into his face. Other people showed up, and I had lost all feeling of making this a fair fight. The guy was getting rag-dollish, but I kept going. I landed a few uppercuts in him, picked him up and drove him into the pavers.

  ‘How do you like it?’ I screamed and kicked him in the face. Some girls were screaming at me to stop and charging at me to pull me back.

  Someone yelled, ‘Cops!’
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  It was the same ones as earlier in the night. A paddy wagon materialised behind me. I ran down the back alleys with the coppers chasing me in the paddy wagon. I remember looking back behind me at full sprint and clearly seeing their faces as they tried to chase me down. I jumped a fence and got away. I was too quick and knew it too well. I ended up at a beachside block of flats and jumped into a garbage bin. I was slowing my breathing while I heard the cops just outside, talking about me: ‘He went this way.’ They went away, and I waited till it was really quiet. I got out and looked around.

  We had a rendezvous point we’d agreed on, to meet at four o’clock in the morning if we split up and got into a fight. True to our sort-of-military spirit, pre-arranging an RV was how we used to do it when we were kids. I was walking along towards that point, thinking about the fight. I’d been motivated by taking care of my mate, who was lying on the ground getting his face kicked, but I’d been in those situations before and not lost control. This time, the way I’d laid into that bloke with the cast was frightening. In all those years of karate, I’d known how to control myself in a fight and not do anyone serious damage. It was like the day with Brent when I forgot the rules and swung at him with a closed fist – but much worse. I could have killed the bloke. Losing control of myself didn’t make me feel good. Suddenly a Falcon pulled up beside me. I thought it was some more guys looking for a fight, but it was plain-clothes coppers. I tried to escape, but they ran me down.

  They took me to the police cells, and there were my mates.

  ‘Hey!’ We had a laugh.

  I said, ‘I guess we’re not going to make the RV tonight.’

  The police put us in separate cells, and I was trading stories about the night with the bloke I was put with. The coppers were bringing plenty of drunk people in. Meanwhile my mate, the tuna fisherman, had worked out how to undo the latch of his cell. He didn’t plan to escape, just to make them look silly. When the cops came past the next time, he was casually leaning against the outside of his cell.

  ‘What are you doing, mate?’

  ‘Just wondering if I could get a glass of water and take a piss.’

  We were given court dates, but I was the only one who showed up to the hearing. I pleaded against the charge, which was vagrancy, and the magistrate said words to the effect of, ‘You’re a piece of shit. You’re going down the wrong track.’ He fined me a few hundred dollars. I didn’t care. I was beyond caring. I should have cared about what came out of me when I let loose at that man with the cast. From this distance, it’s pretty obvious, and I’m sorry for the bloke who happened to get in the way of so much pent-up rage. I can see, from here, where my loss of control came from. He couldn’t help it if he wasn’t the person I really wanted to kick the crap out of.

  SIX

  Whether or not I admitted it to myself, I was in a churned-up state. You can go through the loss of both of your parents without breaking down into a blubbering mess, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be affected in other ways. If you hold down one part of your nature, the trauma’s going to pop up somewhere else.

  While I was in Dorrigo, I caught up with my ex-flatmate Melissa, who’d moved back north after the break-up of the Camperdown house. We were sitting in the back seat of a car chatting and waiting for people to come out, and all of a sudden we were kissing and carrying on. It was weird because we’d known each other for so long and lived with each other, and because she’d just got out of a relationship. But we’d always got along well, never mind the age difference.

  I was vulnerable and it had something to do with that, but it developed into something more. A summertime love almost. When all the fuss died down, she and I had an idyllic few weeks, swimming in waterholes, going to the beach, living one day at a time. She was kind and soft, and if there was something maternal in how she cared for me, I’m not going to deny it. In a strange way it was just what I needed.

  One day I was going through my notebooks and found that the day Mum went missing was a year exactly since I’d had that dream about Mum saying, Wake up, Mark. I hadn’t mentioned it to Mum, or anybody. Melissa was a spiritual person and she sensed a message. I’m not sure. I’ve only told a handful of people about it, and even my close mates have looked at me strangely. I guess if Mum hadn’t gone missing, the dream wouldn’t have meant anything and it wouldn’t have stuck with me. But she did, and it has.

  *

  I still wanted to go back to Sydney, though I didn’t have any specific direction. Vaughan was doing his carpentry still, and we moved into a place in Croydon in the inner western suburbs. Melissa drove me down and helped me move in. I wanted to save money, for travel and whatever eventuated. Vaughan was still heavily into partying, which I’d gone beyond. Instead, I threw myself into working in a city restaurant as a kitchen hand, working out in a gym, and doing boxing sessions in the backyard with Vaughan. I got back into karate, working towards my black belt, and laboured on building sites. In my free time I took Lister for walks. Melissa was underpinning everything in my life, and I was enjoying the time with her more and more.

  Deep down, I was in limbo. I was very active but the pieces weren’t coming together. Was I going to keep working as a kitchen hand forever? A labourer? I didn’t quite know why I was in Sydney any more. Vaughan was off on his own trip, which ultimately took a bad turn: he had an undiagnosed schizophrenic condition that was just coming out, with a bit of a hand from too much weed. I was starting to feel adrift.

  Towards the end of the year, I decided to move back up to Dorrigo. Margaret and another auntie came down and helped pack the car and move me up. I was lucky to have that support; they’d do anything for us at the drop of a hat. The house was still there, untouched apart from a bit of maintenance Jo and Gary Beaumont had done to keep it tidy. I got my old job back with the tree-planting company, doing reforestation. Melissa moved in and we stayed until the end of 1998.

  A hellish year ended in a hellish way. On New Year’s Eve, Melissa’s dad, a dairy farmer, was in a car accident and had a stroke. She was really upset. He didn’t fully recover. Melissa moved up to Lismore to be closer to her family, which made things tricky for us. I hitchhiked ridiculous distances, spending up to a couple of hours waiting for lifts, all to see Melissa. My work moved up to Grafton, which was a bit closer, but her life had taken a pretty dramatic turn and I think her focus had moved from being with me to caring for her dad, which was fair enough. We eventually called it quits, with no hard feelings either way. She’d been an essential person in my healing process, and now she was being even more important for her dad.

  While I was living in Dorrigo, I linked up with an old surfer named Kelvin, who lived at Wooli. He and his wife had been friends of Mum’s, and Brent and I knew their kids. Kelvin was stumpy and brown, and we called him ‘Bilbo Baggins’. He definitely had his own way of doing things. Kelvin taught me how to surf, something I’d always wanted to do but hadn’t spent long enough at the beach to put in the commitment. It was such an amazing feeling getting a wave, a total escape, with the sea water performing its own magic, delivering its own hypnosis. Kelvin became a personal mentor too. I was obsessed with surfing and wanted to do it every day. I loved the sense of adventure in finding a wave. I’d put my board under my arm and hitchhike to Sawtell and stay at the beach all day. When you were hunting a wave, there was nothing else you needed to think about. Kelvin showed me I could heal myself by switching from unhealthy to healthy addictions.

  I’d like to think some wisdom or self-awareness came with it. I could definitely feel the anger and aggression draining out of me, and saw the pointlessness in a lot of what I’d been doing. It was like a detox. Surfing taught me not to give up: when you’re getting smashed and your arms are noodles, you just have to drive yourself on. Sometimes I crammed three long sessions into a day. No half-measures! I’d hitchhike for three hours and find the surf was absolute crap; it didn’t matter, I’d still go out a
lone. I loved how surfing was simply me against me. The only person I was proving a point to was myself. Nobody cared whether I made a wave or not, or survived a heavy wipe-out.

  I think I’ve taken some of that philosophy into my approach to soldiering. When you set a successful ambush and complete the mission, it’s a great feeling. But too much emphasis can be placed on winning. It’s important to strive to win every gunfight you get into, but it’s when you’re on the back foot that you need to find your resolve. You can be successful even when you’re getting pounded. Combat situations are not always under your control. When you’re under fire, when it all changes and goes the other way, a lot of guys get panicky and lose their clarity, because they’re all geared up for winning. But I love adversity – it’s where I see a chance to prove myself to myself. I think I got it through Dad, and Mum, and had it reinforced when I got into surfing and copped some frightening beatings from the ocean. They were qualities I think came to serve me well in Afghanistan and might have saved my life more than once.

  For the first time, I developed a bit of hero-worship for someone doing something in public. This was the year Mark Occhilupo came back from a pretty hopeless state and won his world surfing championship. I thought, Shit, this guy’s gone through all this stuff, similar to me in a sense, and then dealt with it and come through. It was unusual for me to read that much into a sportsman’s life, but I was ready to take inspiration wherever I found it. I’ve always loved team sports, learning how to manoeuvre towards a common goal, but the individualistic side of surfing really appealed to me. Your own mind is your toughest competitor. Playing against another team or opponent can be hard, but fighting your own self-doubt can be even harder.

  I remember reading or hearing something a surfer once said: ‘If you’re a surfer and you’re not surfing good waves, you are denying yourself an opportunity.’ For whatever reason it really struck a chord with me. Why settle for mediocrity when you could be enjoying the best parts of life?