It was around this time that I became fixated on a boy called Todd Carter. I’d seen him around school since I first started at Burnside and had always thought he was really good-looking. Over time, though, he seemed to grow in stature. I didn’t know him. I never spoke to him. But in my mind I conjured a godlike figure from the scant information I had about him. He developed into something like a pop star, and finally a saviour. I thought that everything that was wrong in my life would be miraculously reversed if only he could be my boyfriend. I imagined us living a glamorous life together. We would be famous and feted by celebrities. We would live like the people in the magazines.
And yet I knew none of this would ever happen. Todd was in the year ahead of me in school and was as cool and popular as Joanne. I was too nervous to approach him and even if I did, I was sure he would have no interest in me. There was no way we would ever get together. My dreams would never become reality. This filled me with a sense of desolate hopelessness.6Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡBS3MdRF8Ti
–––
Winter that year was especially hard. The cold and rain seeped into me. I became one with the gloomy weather. The overcast skies and chalky light were inside me as well as outside. I was creating the grey world around me, and the grey world was creating me.
One afternoon after school, I sat at my desk and stared out the window. Grey drizzle settled over the grey front garden, the grey street, the grey houses, the grey trees, the grey lawns. Water dripped off the bushes. Droplets trickled down the glass. Even the air inside the house was laced with moisture – I felt the damp on my skin.
I started crying. I didn’t know what I was crying about. It was nothing. It was everything. I tried to stop, but I couldn’t. The tears kept pouring out of me, my shoulders shuddering.6Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ0QB78qsEJW
–––
I started going for long walks at night. I did it out of desperation.
I remember the first time I was at home in the evening and my thoughts were spiralling out of control. I couldn’t stand being indoors any longer. My bedroom was a prison. I had to get out.
I knocked on the door of Dad’s study and told him I was going to visit a friend. Then I slipped outside and set off down the darkened street. The cold pressed against my face, and my breath misted around my mouth. I thrust my hands into my jacket pockets to keep them warm. The houses were all still, silent and clogged with shadow. For a moment I felt a stab of loneliness. No one knew I was out walking. No one cared. I wished someone, anyone, would step out of one of the doorways, or even just switch on a light and look out a window. But no one appeared.
I drifted down a series of streets, not bothering where I was going, just randomly turning left or right whenever I felt like it. I didn’t feel nervous as there was no one around. Even during the day these streets were often empty. A single car growled past at one point, but otherwise I saw no one.
Rows of bungalows reeled past me. Each road I walked along looked the same. The same houses, same parked cars, same immaculate gardens. I felt a mounting sense of gloom. These suburbs were just as much a prison as my bedroom. There was nowhere to go, no way to escape.
I came to a small park, sat under a tree, and then I couldn’t hold back any longer. I sobbed violently, my whole body shaking. Through my tears, I looked up at the clear sky. The blazing stars looked so distant and lonely. I felt I was up there with them, lost in space, with no way back to Earth.6Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡA8fRp46E0g
–––
Some nights, as I was lying in bed, fear gripped me. I became obsessed with the idea that I was dying. Death didn’t seem distant or abstract – I wasn’t worrying about dying at the age of ninety. I believed my death was imminent, that it would be in the next few months or even weeks.
I can’t remember clearly now how these thoughts started. I’d been afraid of the dark as a child, but I’d gradually grown out of this. I no longer trembled in my bed at night thinking some sinister creature was creeping up the hallway, or some monster was lurking in my wardrobe. But new anxieties seemed to flood into my mind to fill the gap.
Warnings and news reports about AIDS were often on the TV. I watched them with a mix of dread and fascination. The disease was spreading inexorably and the doctors couldn’t treat it. There was no cure. It was like the Black Death.
At times, I was convinced I’d caught it. I wasn’t sure how this could have happened. I’d never had sex or had a blood transfusion or done anything that I thought was particularly risky. But I was still sure I’d contracted it somehow. Possibly someone had sneezed over me, or I’d caught it from the swimming pools at Jellie Park.
I would lie in bed imagining the disease spreading through my body. I could feel it oozing like black liquid through my insides, seeping up my legs, sloshing in my torso, flowing around my chest. My skin would go clammy and chills would shoot up my back. My heart would race and I would become breathless. I couldn’t seem to get enough air into my lungs.
Other times it was cancer that was attacking me rather than AIDS. Or it was heart trouble, or some other illness. It could have been anything. All I knew was that it was going to kill me.
Things would always seem better during the day. I would wake in the morning and realise my fears had been silly. Of course I wasn’t sick. There was nothing wrong with me. It was all in my head.
But as night set in again and the shadows thickened outside, the dread would return.
I couldn’t sleep. I struggled to drag myself out of bed in the morning. Mum often had to come into my room and tell me sternly that I had to get up or else I would be late for school.
I almost laughed when she said things like this to me. What did I care about school? I would be dead soon. The world was being smothered in darkness. Everything was sick and rotting from the inside. Suburban Christchurch might look safe and protected, but it was all disintegrating before my eyes. The houses and manicured lawns and trimmed bushes and flowerbeds and parks were all falling into an abyss, and I was falling in with them. What did it matter if I didn’t do well at school?
ns216.73.216.176da2
