In the year I turned twenty-two – two is my favourite number for reasons my analyst once suggested had something to do with my preference for the couple – I went into a crazy phase whereby I threw everything once familiar on its head.
My boyfriend, a gambler and unemployed for most of the four years we spent together, began training with the Commonwealth Police. Fortuitous in some ways. It offered a steady income for one, and for another there was a time he and I were driving along the back streets of East Melbourne when by chance he failed to halt at a stop sign before taking off into the next side street and an unmarked police man off duty saw and stopped us.
‘You went over a stop sign without braking,’ he said after Paul wound down his window.
‘I’m sorry officer. I didn’t realise.’
‘Your driver’s licence?’ Paul dragged out his wallet and proceeded to explain; he was in leave from training with the Commonwealth police. He flashed his ID card, and the police man waved us on.
As simple as that. No ticket and no further explanation needed.
This was one of my first experiences in the world in which certain behaviours are overlooked by virtue of your status. But Paul’s status as a Commonwealth policeman was not enough to keep me with him.
When he was shipped to Sydney for several weeks for training and I was left alone I began to reassess my commitment to him.
He seemed more dedicated than ever from a distance and arranged that I join him one weekend and visit the Blue Mountains. We stayed in an old chalet in Katoomba. Years later, Delia Falconer’s In the Service of Clouds transported me back there.
At the time, the trip seemed onerous and without colour. I was restless and on my return to Melbourne and my first Social Work job at Prince Henry’s hospital where every day I trudged down to our basement department and tried to make sense of this career into which I had been launched, already longing for change.
It came in the form of an invitation to dinner from one of the resident doctors. At first, I said ‘no’. I was in a relationship after all, but then with Paul away I changed my mind and the doctor and I met for pizza in St Kilda and later for sex.
We continued to meet over several weeks until his rotation ended and the doctor fell out of life as easily as he had fallen in.
By then the idea of continuing my relationship with Paul had cemented as a no-way in my mind and in time we found ways of splitting up.
It was a tortured break up as these things go with Paul reluctant to say goodbye. We separated but also hung on for several months with occasional get togethers for comfort and more sex until someone told him they knew I had been unfaithful while we were still together and he was furious.
‘Everyone knew but me,’ he yelled from below stairs and threw the last of my possessions from his place at my doorstep. This clinched it. The idea he was in the dark. The tables had turned so fast and far. When we met I chased him. He was the fancy-free bachelor and I naïve and a 19-year-old fully besotted to the point I once stowed away interstate on the Southern Aurora overnight train to be with him.
This is a long story. Save to say, I had declared myself loud and strong until I no longer felt the fire. It burned out and my crazy 22-year-old life began in earnest.
I think of it as the loneliest year of my life. I had moved into an apartment, chocolate brown brick modernist from the 1960s. We rented on the second floor with a small veranda and huge loungeroom, which we furnished with one long red fabric covered couch we bought second hand.
I moved in with my four years younger sister, ill equipped for life away from home, but desperate to leave the craziness of our father. She had imagined, she told me years later that we would bond together and spend our nights away from work enjoying each other’s company and doing things together.
She worked at the Commonwealth Bank and although in her teens she was the most rebellious of all the girls in my family, she soon settled into domesticity and longing for a quiet life while I grew wilder and more reckless.
I picked a stranger up on a tram one night returning home invited him and he stayed for sex then went on his way. I have no recollection of his name or his appearance. But I was fortunate he seemed kind if not bemused by this weird young woman inviting him home.
In any case, my younger sister was unimpressed. He could have been an axe murderer while she had met a fellow bank employee and fallen in love with him, although he was several years older.
By the time our life in the apartment reached the end if its one year lease, she was married (a marriage that did not last) and I had begun in the relationship that was to last the next fifty years of my life and beyond.
But not before I enjoyed or should I say endured many other assignations with men, young and old, in my search for love. I was as dissociated as a person could be, I see now in retrospect. Finally managing to change jobs from the hospital to a counselling service in Glen Waverly where the work and my colleagues made more sense and offered greater job satisfaction.
But my personal life tormented me like a stone in my shoe and I could not settle at home other than to go on trips to what in these days were called pick up hotels in search of company. The Anchor and Hope in Richmond jumps out in my memory and clubs like the Love Machine in South Yarra. The nights filled with possibility enthralled me more than the need to learn to drive for my counselling job where domestic visits were mandated and I needed to get wheels.
But I was terrified of driving. Phobic my instructor told me one day. It took me over a year of weekly driving instructor lessons, at huge cost to my poor purse, to get the hang of it – clutch, declutch, accelerate – all of it in his turquoise Datsun 120Y through the streets of Caulfield.
It took me three attempts to pass my driver’s exam and even on the third my instructor felt sorry for me and let me by even though my ability at reverse parking was a joke. I have never tried to reverse park since. Though I can now reverse into car spaces allocated clearly, but trying to squeeze myself off the street between two cars still terrifies me and my daughter’s laugh at my ineptitude. ‘It’s easy,’ they say and offer to teach me. But there are some things I refuse to master, life being as it is filled with other endless challenges.
I shall never repeat my twenty second year, but aspects of that young woman lie deep inside of me. I think of Jung’s shadow side, the disavowed parts of myself reflected in this story in so many ways I can only pluck at a few.
You often hear people react in horror at the waywardness of their youth. The things they did which they would never contemplate now. The reckless abandonment of safety in the search for adventure, or he hope that someone will come along and sweep you under their wings and you might fly off together into a life of endless joy. Which never happens we know but we can always dream.