‘Lollies,’ I said.
She didn’t believe me at first, but it was true. I ate one to prove it. She looked relieved.
‘What did you think they were?’ I asked.
‘We thought they were drugs. Mum found them in your schoolbag, along with these.’She pulled out two squashed Indonesian-leaf cigarettes.
I turned pink. Looked closer. ‘Why are they half smoked?’ I asked.
‘Because me and Mum wanted to find out if they were dope, so we lit one each and had a puff.’
I cracked up. That was the most hilarious thing I’d ever heard. My mum, smoking?
It turned out there was a lot I didn’t know about my mum—like the fact that she was more open-minded than I thought. When Anna told Mum she had to let me leave Star of the Sea, because it just wasn’t going to work for a Year Nine like me, Mum surprised me by letting me swap to a school over the other side of town called Preshil—an alternative school, one where the classrooms were among the trees and you could call the teachers by their first name and wear what you wanted, and it was full of creative types. Fay had recommended it once. I’d wanted to go there from the moment I first heard about it, and after a tour with the handsome headmaster, who charmed my mother with stories about what children can become once they’ve been empowered to make their own choices, direct their own learning, my parents agreed. It would take me three hours a day on public transport to get there and back, but I didn’t care. I knew from the second I started that tour and saw kids playing guitar in a large sun-dappled music room that this was where I belonged.
Nevertheless, I got off to a little bit of bumpy start. I now had more freedom than I could ever have imagined possible, and it took me a while to work out what to do with it. It wasn’t that there weren’t rules, it’s just that, as far as I could see, you were under no real obligation to follow them. I was intimidated by the other kids, who seemed so confident, so aware of who they were, so different to my old friends. And then I met Defah.
Boyfriends are all good and well, but it was Defah who was the true love of my teenage years. When we first met, I thought she was tough and scary, and more. What I realise now is that she wasn’t scary, she was just opinionated, and she had no fear of sharing that opinion, and I suppose … I hadn’t really met many girls like her before. As the year rolled on, I began to see that she was also honest and clever and lots and lots of fun, and when we first started to sing together as part of a school project, my world grew brighter. I was ushered into the warm heart of her bohemian family—and the fun of long dinners and late-night soirees in their warehouse off Brunswick Street, and boards of cheese and wine and large blue Le Creuset pots of slow-cooked beef bourguignon at Defah’s big family homestead in Eltham. With Defah’s encouragement I grew little wings of courage, and started confessing more and more of my big fat dreams. I allowed myself to imagine that, as Tracy Chapman sang in ‘Fast Car’, maybe I, too, could one day ‘be someone’. In the bosom of the Dattner family, no dream felt too crazy.
In our houses in these years, there was always music playing—Joni Mitchell and Rickie Lee Jones, Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Donny Hathaway, Debussy, Phoebe Snow. Our friends Aurora and Felicity shared our musical tastes and we started an a cappella band, spending Saturday nights busking on Brunswick Street, Fitzroy. We played our first gig at a garden festival in the leafy suburbs of Kew. It was an inauspicious start: it was raining, we were in a rotunda, and our only audience consisted of the two elderly festival organisers standing under umbrellas. But they were terribly encouraging, and it was a start, and … an end, too: we broke up not long after that, citing … well, none of us can really remember. Professional differences, one supposed. But it was fun. And we continued singing together, because it was the thing that brought us close.
I got a part in the school musical that year—I played Maisie in The Boy Friend. I loved being on stage. But as happened with my songs, Frank got loud every time I was anywhere near victory, with story after story about how I needed to be better than this, smaller than this and then, only then, would I really show the world who I was. In the musical, there was a beach scene where we were all told to wear bathers, but I refused, too ashamed. I thought I would lose the part, but I did not. The embarrassment of being ‘too big’, however, was right there in my head before and sometimes after every show—but not, I noticed, while I was on the stage, playing my part. How curious, I thought.
On the night of the final performance, in the middle of a Charleston, I accidentally kicked off my red high heel, sending it flying into the audience. Mortified, but in character, I put my hand on my mouth like Betty Boop, ran into the crowd, pointed to my shoe under a chair, and then flirted with the man who bent down and handed it to me. The crowd thought it was all part of the act and roared with laughter. This, I realised, might just be the best feeling in the whole world: making something good from our mistakes.
After the show that night, Defah’s Aunty Fabian sought me out and told me something my sixteen-year-old self really needed to hear: ‘You were wonderful! You sparkled up there!
