Puberty Blues (9 page)

THE Greenhills Gang was changing.

Now we went down the beach for different reasons. We didn't go down to check out the guys or bask in the sun—we went down to score.

‘Hey Gull, can you get anything?'

‘Oh yeah.'

‘Wot?'

‘Oh Deak knows a guy who's got some unroole hash. Twenty-five bucks a cap.'

Sue and I scraped together twenty-five dollars from advances on pocket money, selling old records and pawning old friendship rings.

A cap is about half an inch long and looks like a penicillin capsule. It's filled with a black, sickly, sweet-smelling, thick, tar-like oil.

We surfie chicks met in the PE changing rooms
during the girls' assembly, for a smoke. We'd all heard Mrs Yelland's ‘girls only' lecture a hundred times. ‘
Would
you girls kindly use the sanitary incinerators provided? Mr Dunstan has been working for us for twelve years and he's never seen anything like it …'

We had better things to do.

‘Hey, lock the door Kim. Didja get the alfoil?'

‘Yeah, I knocked it off from home science.'

‘Give us it.'

I spotted the hash oil on to the alfoil. Rummaging through my bag I found a half-melted, degutted biro. Tracey lit the alfoil from underneath. I positioned my pen over the brown blotch and sucked up the smoke through the plastic straw.

‘Give us a hit,' said Sue.

Pretty soon we were all giggling and buzzing.

‘Come on, we'd better split.'

Sue and I headed off for English.

‘Do my eyes look bloodshot?' Sue grabbed me frantically by the arm.

‘Nah … Do mine?'

‘Na.'

‘Sorry we're late, Miss. Left something in the PE changing rooms.'

We joined our friends up the back.

‘Deadset, I'm so out of it,' I confided in Gail. ‘Can you smell it?'

We panicked about our bloodshot eyes all period. If the teacher even glanced in our direction we were
sure she knew. The lesson was spent with us freaking out and paranoid behind our books.

For most of us marijuana was enough to relieve the boredom but Frieda Cummins, Jeff Basin and Cheryl Nolan needed more—their mother's Mandrax, Valium or an acid trip at four dollars a pill. It made the day go faster and improved their reputations.

‘Cheryl's trippin'.'

‘Wot on?'

‘White Light. Check out the way she's walkin'! She dropped it on the bus this mornin'.'

During Mr Bishop's lecture in assembly, Cheryl began to sway drunkenly.

‘And you, lassie!' he boomed down the microphone, ‘Can't you hold yourself up?'

Cheryl yawned at him and the headmaster ordered her up to his office, to be ‘dealt with' later.

‘Go on lassie.
Move!'

She started to move across the quadrangle, taking painfully small steps. She walked in slow motion, staring defiantly at Mr Bishop.

No one spoke or moved. The first-form kids even stopped gawking at the dogs screwing outside the science block. We all watched Cheryl totter across the front of the quadrangle. She dragged herself up the steps, planted both feet on the top stair and turned to address the assembly. Letting out a loud raspberry, she stabbed the air savagely with an ‘up-yours' gesture and turned to continue her trek to the office. The assembly
crumbled. We were laughing so loud we didn't even hear Mr Berkoff blowing his whistle. Cheryl was expelled.

Things were getting heavy for my surfie gang. Vicki's mother found a dope deal in her daughter's drawer and rang up to confide in Mrs Dixon. So Kim got grounded and ran away from home. Johnno got busted for smoking hash. Mum freaked when she saw his picture in the local paper. She told me to get some new friends.

Wayne and I didn't go anywhere anymore. We didn't even go to the drive-in. Friday and Saturday nights we hung out on the main street of Cronulla, buying, selling and smoking dope. Sue and I sat with the boys on the steps of the Soul Patterson's chemist. We could all tell the junkies. They spent most of the night buying hamburgers and then spewing them up into the garbage bins. We'd started to suspect a lot of our friends. Hitting up was the new cool thing to do. If you had needle pricks in your arm, you were tough, and top. A lot of people pretended to be heroin addicts.

‘Oh look at Lorraine Peck. The bullshit artist.'

‘What? Where?' asked Wayne.

‘Oh leaning up against the post office. She doesn't hit up you know. She just scratches herself and coughs, the rag. She'd root for a scaffe,'
^*
I told him.

‘Yeah,' agreed Wayne. ‘She wouldn't get rooted for a scag
^†
though. She's not worth it. No one would waste it on her. Comin' for a smoke?'

‘Nah.' I was too stoned to move. Sue and I kept sitting on the cold cement step while Wayne went off to the parking lot with Danny and Gull to blow another number. As I lit up my Marlboro, Sue nudged me urgently.

‘Hey Deb, that's not Garry is it?' She pointed across the road to a washed-out figure huddled in the doorway of the shoe shop. From where I was sitting I could see he was pale and thin. His surfie physique had deteriorated into a soggy slouch. He lifted up his blank face and seemed to stare straight through me.

‘God …' I gasped. ‘It
is
Garry. Let's go. Quick.' We ran down the alley to the beach and stood very close together on the footpath. Leaning against the railing, Sue and I watched the sea surge, swell and smash on the rocks. A thick thread of smoke coiled up into the sky from the Kurnell oil refinery.

‘It stinks,' I said, stamping out my cigarette.

‘What?'

‘Everything.'

 

Cronulla was getting duller. More and more of our friends were hitting up. Sue and I were sick of sitting in the car with the boys stoned and paranoid. We were
sick of fetching Chiko rolls. We were sick of sun-bathing and towel-minding while the boys surfed. For once
we
wanted some of the action. So, we bought a board. It was a cut-down Jackson, for ten dollars. We put in five dollars each. It was pretty dinged but we were really proud of it. After a few weeks we got brave enough to take it to the beach.

On Sunday we caught the nine-fifteen train to Cronulla. As usual.

‘We gunna do it?'

‘Yeah.'

‘I'm packin' shit,' said Sue, heaving the board off the train. Sue carried the fin end and I carried the nose.

‘Ya Bankie chicks!' someone called out from the Surf Dive and Ski shop.

We went to South Cronulla first. That was Dickheadland anyway. Two more dickheads wouldn't be that conspicuous.

‘You sure there's no one here we know?' Sue said, checking out the crowd.

I laughed at her. ‘Who do we know who'd hang out here?'

‘What if Danny sees me?'

‘Oh, too bad.'

I paddled out first. Sue couldn't stop laughing at me slipping off and getting chundered. After we'd both had a few goes, it was time to show off to the boys. We carted the board up the beach past North Cronulla and Wanda. One surfie jaw dropped after
another: ‘Hey, check out those chicks!' We dragged our battered board round to Greenhills.

All our gang were there 'cause the sets were pumping. They saw us staggering along from a distance.

Seagull laughed gruffly: ‘Hah! Whose chicks are they?'

‘Dog-eat-dogs,' moaned Johnno.

‘Bloody Towners,' sneered Wayne.

Strack was peeling off his wetsuit. ‘Check 'em out. Deadset molls.'

Danny went pale as a shot of recognition electrocuted his face.

‘Fucken
Jeezus!
' he moaned and buried his head in the sand.

We approached our gang. They gaped at us, horrified.

‘Hey Johnno,' I asked, ‘lend us ya boardshorts?'

‘Watcha want me boardies for?' He scowled.

‘To ride our board,' I explained.

‘Cut the shit.'

Our gang disowned us. None of our girlfriends said hello. Sue and I surfed all day. I knelt twice. Sue giggled so much she couldn't even make it to shore lying down. We didn't venture very far out. If I did catch a big wave, I just clutched the sides of the board and screamed all the way in. It was unreal fun.

In between surfs, we dried in the sun with our board between us. The guys from our gang walked by on their way to the afternoon swells. Wayne and
Danny completely ignored us. We were dropped. Steve Strachan paused to peer over us in his big, black wetsuit. ‘Yews chicks are bent.' He shook his head. ‘Fuckin' bent.'

All afternoon we splashed and squealed and nose-dived. When we were exhausted, Sue and I tried to carry the board home up the beach. The wind bashed it against our legs. We climbed the sandhill at Wanda and looked back.

And there were the boys, a mass of black specks way out to sea. The surf had dropped. They sat astride their boards in the grey, flat water; waiting. I knew they'd be talking about their chicks. They always did, way out there when the waves weren't working.

‘Hey Deb, let's get a milk shake.'

Sue and I walked off.

ALL this happened a long time ago when we were very young. Some of us have turned twenty now and many of us have changed.

 

Jeff Basin—Heroin habit.

Bruce Board—Labourer in Caringbah. Unmarried father.

Frieda Cummins—Unknown.

Dave Deakin—Dead. Heroin overdose in Queensland.

Danny Dixon—Plumber in steady job in Sylvania Heights.

Kim Dixon—Numerous breakdowns.

Garry Hennessy—Heroin habit. Serving seven-year gaol sentence for armed robbery of a chemist.

Glen Jackson—Heroin habit. Involved in same robbery but got off. Dobbed Garry and Johnno. Father to Vicki Russell's baby.

Johnno—Heroin habit. Serving nine-year gaol sentence for same robbery.

Tracey Little—Heroin addict, admitted to Drug Rehabilitation Centre.

Kerrie Mead—Fell pregnant, baby adopted.

Cheryl Nolan—Heroin addict, admitted to Drug Rehabilitation Centre.

Darren Peters—Heroin addict, whereabouts unknown.

Vicki Russell—Unmarried mother.

Seagull—Heroin habit and on the run.

Steve Strachan—Gave up surfing and started drinking. Hangs at local pub.

Wayne Wright—Dead. Mysterious heroin-related accident.

Susan Knight and Deborah Vickers—Ran away from school and at eighteen wrote this book.

Kathy Lette moved on from
Puberty Blues
to work as a newspaper columnist and television sitcom writer in Los Angeles and New York. She has subsequently written eleven international bestsellers including
Girls' Night Out
,
Mad Cows
(the movie starred Joanna Lumley and Anna Friel),
How to Kill Your Husband
(recently staged by the Victorian Opera),
The Boy Who Fell To Earth
(soon to be a feature film, starring Emily Mortimer) and
To Love, Honour and Betray
(her update on
Puberty Blues
). Her novels are published in fourteen languages. Kathy appears regularly as a guest on the BBC and CNN News. She is an ambassador for Women and Children First, Plan International and the White Ribbon Alliance. In 2004 she was the London Savoy Hotel's Writer in Residence, where a cocktail named after her can still be ordered. Kathy is an autodidact (a word she taught herself) but in 2010 received an honorary doctorate from Southampton Solent University.

Kathy lives in London with her husband and two children. Visit her website at
kathylette.com
and on
twitter.com/KathyLette
.

 

Gabrielle Carey is the author of novels, biography, autobiography, essays, articles and short stories, including
Confessions of a Teenage Celebrity
, about the tumultuous time surrounding the writing and publishing of
Puberty Blues
. Gabrielle teaches writing at the University of Technology, Sydney, where her long-standing preoccupation with James Joyce is happily tolerated. Her most recent publication was a contribution to
Collaborative Dubliners: Joyce in Dialogue
. Gabrielle is currently researching the life and work of Australian novelist and poet Randolph Stow. Her website is
gabriellecarey.com.au