No More Tomorrows (5 page)

As we were leaving, I’d go to the shops to buy the three of us kids a big, round, rainbow-coloured lollipop each. We always got home just before Merc and Michael returned from school.

On the weekends, Dad would take all of us to Sea World, so Merc and Michael could join in, too. I’d sit on the swinging ship for most of the day again.

We always had a great time at Dad’s place, too, as it was an adventure to camp on the floor of his room in the coalminers’ living quarters. There was a smorgasbord restaurant that was the best in town, and as Dad worked at the mine as an auto-electrician, we could eat there for free every night. Having a sweet tooth, it was heaven for me to be able to have two desserts, even for breakfast, if I felt like it.

Dad would usually take his holidays to coincide with ours, so we could go down and hang out on his property, about three hours away at Sarina. It had its own private beach, and Merc and Michael would drive around on it endlessly in a beach buggy that Dad had built for us from old car parts. I had no interest in sitting up front, preferring instead to enjoy the ride in the back seat with my dolls and my handbag. The four of us would also go on bushwalks for hours across Dad’s land.

Although he lived hundreds of kilometres away, somehow Dad knew every single thing that went on with us. Even when we gotin trouble, he knew. If he’d been a fly on our wall, he couldn’t have known more. We’d ask him, ‘Dad, how do you know that?’ He’d always answer the same: ‘I’ve got spies, spies everywhere!’ I guess Mum must have filled him in, because he never missed a trick.

We were always the centre of Dad’s life, and he never left us in any shadow of a doubt that he loved us deeply and that we were very precious to him. Seeing me in here broke his heart; I saw that in his eyes every time he came to visit. I cannot accept he is now one, it is too unbearably painful. I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye before he died in January 2008. I loved my dad so much and I guess I always stayed his baby, as he didn’t have any more kids.

Mum calls me her baby, too, although she went on to have three more. Her fourth, Clinton, has always been difficult, and, as has been widely reported, he’s spent time in and out of jail. He has a problem: he’s a kleptomaniac. My family still tries to look after Clinton, because we love him and we’re always hoping that one day he’ll learn and change. Life works in mysterious ways, and I think maybe what’s happened to me is giving him the will to change. He’s got a job, and liking the rewards of earning his own money and buying his own things
legally
. We’re proud of him and I love him.

James and Mele are numbers five and six, to Mum’s third partner, whom we call ‘Big James’. Little James was always a good kid, very quiet and law-abiding. He even made school captain. Mele is the true baby of the family and was like my baby doll, whom I dressed up and pampered, as I was twelve when she was born. We were very close, and it hurts that I have not been around to help her grow, to answer her questions about teenage life and just be there for her any time she needed me.

Growing up with so many brothers and sisters was great fun, and we did a lot together – like bike riding or camping at the beach most summer weekends, squeezing into our little tents. Mum never showed any favouritism; she shared her love, her time and her affections evenly with all of us. And none of us ever classed each other as a half-brother or half-sister – we’re all the same. It wasn’t until my story hit the headlines that the media started differentiating between us, using the terms ‘half-brother’ and ‘half-sister’and talkingabout the fact that we had three different fathers.

The media made my family life look like a disgrace, as if we’d had some desperately deprived childhood – which is so far from the truth. We were not rich, but we were certainly loved and never went without. We almost always got what we asked for; we’d just have to wait until Mum had saved up for it. She worked several factory jobs and deprived herself of things so she could give more to us. If I wanted a $100 pair of shoes, Mum would buy them for me when she was able to. She did the best she possibly could for us and gave us all she could. She still does. Other kids in our neighbourhood and at school said that we were spoilt.

And growing up with three different male figures in the househad no effect on me at all. I only had one dad and I saw a lot of him. Getting used to the other two didn’t bother me or seem at all strange. I just went with the flow. We always had a lot of love in our house and a very strong sense of family and of security.

I guess I’ve always had Merc, as well. I can’t really talk about my life without talking about my sister in the same breath, because she’s played such a defining role in it. All my life, she’s looked after me with such love and devotion. She’s always been therefor me, encouraging me, teaching me and protecting me. I guess I thought that’s what big sisters were invented for, although I never imagined I’d end up depending on her for almost every basic essential in life.

As kids, if Mum wasn’t home (usually because she was working late), Merc would snap into the role. She’d cook us dinner, prepare our school lunches and generally make sure we were OK. She was and still is my best friend. If I ever needed to talk to someone, I talked to Merc, and do now. We’ve always done everything together and shared everything; we shared a bedroom, we shared clothes, we shared friends, we shared secrets.

Back when we were kids, we’d spend hours sitting together in the backyard making clover-chain necklaces or picking Mum’s best flowers, crushing them and then squeezing them into little bottles to make perfume. Mum’s dressing table was always covered in these bottles of our stinky ‘flower perfume’. We also sold them to our good-sport neighbours for twenty cents a bottle. Merc and I would go bike riding together, take dancing classes together, play with our dolls together, watch TV together and just hang out. We were virtually inseparable.

Mum used to dress us in matching outfits, as if we were her little blonde and brunette twins, but our personalities were as different as our hair colour. For instance, I like things to be neat and perfectly ordered, while Merc is the untidiest person I know – although Mum comes close. Merc’s messiness used to annoy me so much that when we shared a bedroom I placed an imaginary line down the centre of the room, and the deal was that she had to keep her junk on her side of the line. As a result, our dressing table had one side almost bare and the other like an over flowing tip. My invisible line usually ended up becoming pretty visible. Thankfully, we did have separate wardrobes, because no invisible line could have survived that chaos. The bottom of her wardrobe was piled so high with shoes and clothes that it would meet the clothes of hers that were hanging – although there were usually few of those.

I must admit, though, that even with all her big messy piles of school papers and hoarded junk sprawled across her side of the room, Merc could always instantly lay her hands on anything she wanted. I, on the other hand, had a place for everything and didn’t hoard a thing but could never find what I wanted, except a use for something that I’d thrown out a week ago.

Apart from being a lot neater, I was also more reserved. I find it uncomfortable sparking up conversations with people I don’t know – though I’ve been forced to do so lately – and instinctively tend to hold back before trusting anyone. Merc, on the other hand, is a born extrovert who loves to talk to everyone, from the person next to her in the supermarket queue to the Queen of Sheba. She always sees the best in people, tending to trust them instantly. It’s a beautiful trait and one of the reasons why she’s so special, but it can also be very dangerous when you’re thrown into deep trouble like this, with all kinds of people crawling out of the woodwork to ‘help’. Her open and trusting nature has taken a battering over the last few years, as we’ve both been burnt by people we’d put our trust in.

A lot of the things I’ve done in my life have been as a result of being swept along in Merc’s current. I can happily just drift, quietly whiling away the hours daydreaming, drawing or watching TV. A day like that would send Merc crazy. She knows how to use time wisely and likes to get the maximum out of each day. She’s dynamic, always on the go, creating things to do and encouraging me along with her.

I should stress here that I’d often go with the flow but would never do anything I didn’t actually want to do. I was always good at digging my heels in and not budging. I can be stubborn. Nobody, for instance, could have convinced me to put that marijuana in my boogie-board bag.

After Merc and I quit our ballet lessons, she booked us into taekwondo classes. Then, when I was about fifteen, I followed Merc and Michael into the local surf club, which is where I fatefully discovered my love for boogie-boarding.

To me, boogie-boarding was the perfect compromise between the thrill of riding the waves and the danger of being slashed by a sharp surfboard fin: it was still challenging and fun, but not too scary. Merc was into surfboarding, though, and was totally fearless; often her feet didn’t even touch the board – she’d catch a wave so fierce that she’d be wiped out. The three of us also trained as lifeguards, and every weekend we’d put on our uniforms and patrol the beaches. I didn’t rescue anyone, but Michael, who became a full-time council lifeguard, saved a man and his son from drowning after they were dragged far out to sea in a rip.

I’ve always had a passion for sport and at school was much more successful outside the classroom than in it. Despite my projects being beautifully presented, I wasn’t exactly a straight-A student. But on the sports field, it was blue ribbons all the way. All through my school years, I could outrun the wind.

During my first-ever race day, in grade one, I flew past the finish line so many lengths ahead of the other girls that I was put in the boys’ race and won that, too. The excited sports teacher, who was keen to test my limits, then raced me against girls a year older, followed by the boys from the same age group. I kept winning. My limit was finally reached when I was narrowly beaten by a boy two years older than me. My mum was cheering from the sidelines and says that it was one of the proudest days of her life. I was invited to join Little Athletics when I was a bit older, but didn’t. I also really loved touch football and was team captain every year in high school.

I was placid, easy-going and usually laughing at something, so much so that in primary school, teachers nicknamed me ‘Giggling Gertie’. I’ve always found little things in daily life funny, although it’s getting harder to see them these days. One of my primary school teachers wrote to me recently, saying I was the student she least expected to ever get into trouble.

I was good, but I wasn’t perfect. In high school, for instance, I did have the occasional puff on a cigarette and the occasional beer, although Mum was strictly against me doing either. And though it may now hold significance in some people’s minds, like many teenagers I tried smoking marijuana. It’s hard for me to write about this because of what marijuana has done to my life and the judgements some people will make, but I feel I shouldn’t have to hide it. A bit of teenage experimentation doesn’t make me guilty of smuggling marijuana ten or so years later. I’ve got absolutely nothing to hide, and from the very start of all this, in an interview with
60 Minutes
just a couple of weeks after I was arrested, I readily admitted to having experimented with marijuana.

I first tried it when I was about fourteen years old and had gone down to the Gold Coast for the weekend with a group of friends from the surf club. There were around eight of us and everyone wanted to try it, so we each chipped in $5. On the Saturday afternoon, we walked down to the beach, sat in a circle between the rocks, for a windbreak, and prepared to smoke the dope through a Coke can. As we talked and laughed, we started taking turns and passing it on, usually with a lot of coughing and spluttering. I was feeling pretty curious but also awkward and shy because I didn’t know how to do it. I watched carefully as the can was passed around, so when it was my turn, I just put my mouth over the can and drew back. It was harder than it looked, and the thick smoke sent me into a coughing fit. I tried a couple more times and soon my coughing fits were followed by fits of uncontrollable laughter.

When everyone had had a couple of turns, we packed up and walked up the hill, still laughing away at absolutely anything. That night I had a great sleep. We tried it a couple more times the following day, but I didn’t seem to laugh as much as before. Instead, I just felt lazy and extremely hungry, and each time I’d end up in a takeaway shop.

I was bored with it and after that weekend didn’t try it again until I was eighteen. I had maybe one or two puffs at a couple of parties, but I soon learnt that dope wasn’t good for me. It had such a weird effect on my mind. It made me feel so paranoid that I wouldn’t even speak to my friends, and afterwards I’d lock myself in my room, not wanting to answer the phone or the door. I was left with a horrible feeling of self-loathing and a depressing, distorted way of looking at the world.

I’ve known since then that I can’t smoke pot, because it doesn’t agree with the chemicals in my brain. I didn’t touch it again after I was eighteen, and became quite anti marijuana-smoking. I refused to even talk to anyone who was stoned, because they would usually be so out of it, with those sad red eyes.