The Lucky One

by Krystal Barter

  Subski, for the uninitiated, is like every tasteless American college movie you’ve ever seen, but all rolled together, oh, and on crack. Short for ‘Sydney University Boarders and Ski Society’, Subski specialised in social skiing, with the emphasis on social (I knew club members who had never seen snow). Subski was known for hosting the wildest parties at Sydney Uni’s vast campus. Parties such as their infamous traffic light parties, where you had to wear red, yellow or green depending on your romantic status in order to shout to the world, without the need for annoying conversation, just how available you were right then and there. Theirs were parties where the decorations were inflated goon bags and the beer was measured in kegs. I had found my spiritual home.

  It’s fair to say that I had a massive night at my first Subski party. So massive, in fact, that when I woke up the next morning I had something of an epiphany on the careers front.

  ‘That’s it!’ I decided. ‘I’ve found my true calling. I’m not going back to study teaching, in fact, I’m not going back to uni at all. I’m going to spend my life partying! And when I’m not partying, I’ll be working to pay for my partying.’ Because even through a hangover I had the clarity of vision to see that getting wasted on the scale that Subski had revealed to me was going to require some funds.

  So I dropped out of my course. I had lasted six measly weeks at university before I threw it all away to work in various, entry-level jobs so I could earn enough money to buy the outfits, alcohol and drugs that my all-important lifestyle demanded. Looking back, I really regret not persevering with my teaching degree because I wouldn’t have made a bad teacher, eventually. But at the time I couldn’t have been happier with my newfound ‘career choice’ because it got me out of the classroom and back on the dance floor and that’s where I thought I belonged.

  It wasn’t long before this that I broke up with my first boyfriend, Tyrone. Tyrone and I met through our mutual mate Peter, and we’d been together since I was fifteen. A Holden-driving, party-going Northern Beaches surfer, Tyrone was a couple of years older than me (important) and easily the best-looking guy me and my friends knew (even more important). He had finished school by the time we started dating but he was the boy most girls at my high school dreamed about.

  ‘Gotta go, Tyrone’s here,’ I’d say casually to my friends as he cruised by the school gate to pick me up after I finished school for the day. With the skirt of my school uniform rolled up at the waistband to shorten it as far as it would go, I’d saunter over to this rust-bucket of a car (complete with surfboard strapped to the roof) and slip into the passenger seat like I was slipping into a Rolls. Classy.

  Mostly, Tyrone and I spent our time hanging out with his friends, who had that shimmering and perpetually unattainable appeal of being two years older than me, and therefore two years cooler in my teen mind. I went to parties with this crowd, got drunk with this crowd and yet, throughout it all, I couldn’t for the life of me work out why Tyrone chose me as his girlfriend.

  Why does he want to go out with me? I wondered. I’m not attractive. I’d even go as far to say I was funny-looking. (Although, I never seemed to have any trouble getting boyfriends; and cute ones, too.) Yet the hottest guy I know has chosen to be my boyfriend. It made no sense. Still, I wasn’t stupid enough to ever point this out to Tyrone. If he was so blind to his own attractiveness (and to my relative unattractiveness), then who was I to come along and clear things up with my twenty-twenty vision?

  It did come with its fair share of problems, though.

  Tyrone was a really nice guy but throughout our relationship we fought, a lot, and even at the time I could see it was mostly my fault. Oh, god, he just looked sideways at that other girl! I would screech inside my 16-year-old head. That’s it; that’s it! I can’t cope with this any longer! He doesn’t really love me! And down and around my thoughts would spiral until Tyrone and I would wind up embroiled in yet another argument about yet another girl who may or may not have caught my boyfriend’s eye as we walked past her at the beach/shops/movies/insert your own option here. Everywhere, basically.

  It was my insecurities that caused us to break up in the end. One of the sorer points in our (at times, very sore) relationship was the fact that Tyrone turned eighteen two years before I did and so was legally able to go to pubs and clubs while I was still too young. For a couple of years there Tyrone would abandon me, infuriatingly underage, in order to go out drinking with our friends. And then a day or a week or a month later it would inevitably be reported back to me just how much fun Tyrone had while he was out clubbing and exactly how he’d been spotted tearing up the dance floor with some other girl while I wasn’t around. The rage I experienced was insane! I could barely see straight for the lurid green lights beaming out of my eyes. And somehow this all feels especially brutal when you’re a crazy teenage girl. At the time I was so unsure of who I was, and so afraid of disliking who I’d become, that life was a constant battle to fit in. I was always trying to be someone I wasn’t. And when I wasn’t trying to be someone else, then I was busy worrying that someone else was lurking around the corner waiting to steal my boyfriend away. So, when I was only a few weeks shy of my eighteenth birthday, and on a night when I was fed up with Tyrone going out without me again (and when I was tempted by the notion of going to Schoolies Week happily single), I issued an ultimatum: ‘You go out tonight and we’re done.’

  And he did, and we were.

  It was that simple. No tears or tantrums or impassioned speeches. At the end of the day it was the best thing for both of us (and, fast forward a few years, and I was on the dance floor at Tyrone’s wedding, having introduced him to one of my friends who he ended up marrying). Back then, though, I don’t think Tyrone really believed I would break up with him. I’m not sure I believed it myself. But, by the time our relationship ended, I was finally—incrementally—starting to gain some self-confidence. Which could have gone one of two ways. Path A: I might finally grow up, ditch the drugs and booze completely (I had cut back on the pot while with Tyrone), and then emerge from the mire of my teenage years as a confident and articulate young woman, wiser for the mistakes of my youth. Or Path B: I could be worse than ever; worse with added confidence. I chose B.

  So I drank, I smoked, and I took drugs with true abandon. I started my day with Baileys Irish Cream Whiskey on my cornflakes and things went steadily downhill from there. I drank vodka from a recycled 250-millilitre water bottle and, at the rate I was going through it, it may as well have been Mount Franklin I was sculling. In addition to this, and as well as my longstanding pot practice, I now dabbled in ecstasy and speed in more worrying amounts. While my friends were happy to pop pills at parties on weekends, I was increasingly using these drugs throughout the working week. In fact, at the height of my habit (or the nadir, depending how you look at it), I was taking eccy most weekend nights (that’s Thursday through to Sunday inclusive), as well as speed every second day. Every day, at my worst. Occasionally, I showed some class (and some cash) and got myself some cocaine. But I drew the line at heroin because, in my drug-addled brain, I still considered my behaviour to be normal enough, whereas heroin was strictly for junkies. Everything else, though, was fair game. And the effects were undeniable.

  For instance, I’m not a naturally energetic person; I suffer from low blood pressure, I often feel lethargic, hell, I can drink coffee and still want to go to sleep. But when I was on speed I was a woman possessed! After popping just one of those magical tabs, I could dance all night, I could talk for Australia, I would move and think and feel like someone had plugged my index finger into an electrical socket and there were 100 000 volts of pure, exhilarating energy flowing through my veins. (Note: kids, don’t try this at home; the drugs or the electrical socket.) I would, for instance, come home at four or five in the morning, after hours and hours of uninterrupted dancing and partying, and decide to clean the house. Scrubbing and mopping and dusting my way around my parents’ place, I must have looked like some demen
ted fairy godmother, or I would have done if there was anyone else stupid enough to be awake at that hour. It’s laughable now—especially when you see the messy state of my house (maybe that’s because my drug of choice these days is a double espresso, though don’t think I haven’t toyed with the idea of dropping a couple of tabs just to get some housework done occasionally …).

  But the real appeal of speed wasn’t the ‘pick-me-up’. No, it was the ‘let-me-out’: the escape hatch it offered. Drugs allowed me to run away from my life. They let me create my own version of reality, where happiness and pleasure-seeking were sharply in focus and cancer was some blurred abstraction in the background.

  And when I came down? Well, I just went straight back up again. I yo-yo’ed between manic hyperactivity and melancholy comedowns, but I never allowed myself to actually bottom out and wake up back in reality. Throughout this whole time I was so rarely ‘straight’ that I forgot what being ‘Krystal’ was supposed to feel like. Speed turned me into a space cadet, like some strange carbon-copy of myself, as if someone had Photoshopped my image, but ever so slightly, so that I couldn’t quite put my finger on the bits that weren’t right or real. I was never truly happy but I was never truly sad; I lived in some strange muted limbo in-between the two, as if I had no real feelings at all.

  Of course, this was exactly what I craved: a release from the worry and the anguish and the pain that cancer brought into my family. I know, cancer was no excuse, but perhaps it goes some way to explaining why I was so keen to pump myself full of methamphetamines. It makes me shudder now when I consider how regularly I was taking stuff that was cooked up in some random backyard who-knows-where and cut with who-knows-what. It was pure luck that I never got a bad batch. But the truth is, my drug abuse has had a very tangible and very negative impact on my health.

  Where I was once really coordinated (sports captain, remember?), I now struggle with catching a ball. And before drugs I never had to wear glasses, whereas now I can barely drive at night as the streetlights and traffic lights swim before my eyes and I find it impossible to focus. Plus, there was the vast amounts of alcohol I was drinking. (After all that I’ve put it through, I’d hate to bump into my liver in a dark alley nowadays.)

  I used to carry a water bottle full of neat vodka with me at parties and neither the taste nor the vodka sweats the next day ever stopped me from draining the bottle. I’d scull anything, from tart cider to sickly sweet Passion Pop, and my favourite party trick was downing my friends’ unattended drinks before they had the chance to do it themselves. Being ‘straight’ at parties was never an option for me but, more than that, I always had to be the person to take things one step further. You can scull that beer? I’ll do two. You’re popping pills? Not as many as me. You’re messy and crazy and fucked up and wild? You ain’t got anything on me, baby. I’m all that and more.

  I should mention here, too, that, like so many teenagers, I battled a bad relationship with my body. For me this started in the latter part of my childhood and continued well into my twenties (and really didn’t end until I became a mum, and had other precious little bodies to look after, and then realised the importance of being healthy). My eating problems began when I had glandular fever while I was in primary school and I was so sick I could barely eat; my stomach shrunk as a result and I never really ate properly again for years after that. And, while the glandular fever wasn’t the underlying cause of my eating disorder, it was the initial trigger. Yet again, it was illness that shaped my life.

  In my teens I controlled my body weight by going for days without eating then bingeing for days afterwards. I used to skip meals and hide food then gorge in secret and make myself vomit. I would throw out my school lunches and count calories fastidiously. Then later, when I was older, I would use drugs to suppress my appetite and go for days and days existing on nothing more than an apple and some crackers, or Cheezels and creaming soda (a breakfast of champions, if ever there was one). I morphed from being an overachieving perfectionist of a child into an obsessively skinny young woman (at my worst I weighed less than 50 kilograms). Such a cliché would be laughable if it wasn’t so sad. Because as all the textbooks will tell you: my attempts to control my diet were a reaction to the fact I couldn’t control anything else in my life. Not my genes, not my health, not my longevity, not my future; as I was to discover when I entered the brave new world of genetic testing when I turned eighteen.

  CHAPTER 5

  Taking a genetic test to see if you’re carrying a cancer gene is an experience like no other. Even through my teenage drama-queen fog—where a pimple is a trauma, and boyfriend troubles a catastrophe—I knew I wasn’t overreacting by being spooked at the thought of a BRCA genetic test. And by spooked, read: scared stupid. With one single blood test, one quick sample sent off to a lab somewhere, I would know, with near-certainty, exactly how likely I was to develop breast cancer in the future. And the odds didn’t look good. Around 12 per cent of all women will get breast cancer at some point in their lives, versus up to 80 per cent of women who have inherited the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene mutation (although, only 10 per cent of families fall into this ‘high risk’ category). To test positive to the BRCA1 gene which my family carried was about the least positive thing that I could think of. Which is why, when I was eighteen years old and only recently out of high school, it was Mum’s idea, and not mine, to book me in for genetic testing.

  ‘We’re here for a blood test at three o’clock. It’s booked under the name Krystal Barter,’ Mum instructed the receptionist. I could hear the nervousness in her voice.

  ‘I can do this myself, you know.’ Irritation was my default setting with Mum.

  ‘I know, darling,’ soothed Mum. ‘Let’s go in there together and get this test out of the way then we can go home.’

  Sure, I thought, only you’re omitting one small detail there. You know, the one where I test positive to the BRCA1 genetic mutation and then spend the rest of my life waiting for my breasts to suddenly sprout cancerous tumours that will eat away at me from the inside out until I’m dead and buried and rotting in the ground? Remember that old chestnut, Mum?

  I folded my arms sullenly across my chest as I sat in the plastic waiting-room chair. Mum sat next to me, forcibly acting blithe, as she flicked through the surgery’s tattered copy of The Women’s Weekly. It was like we were on some cosy mother–daughter excursion to get our nails done and there’d be champagne and cupcakes coming up next.

  ‘Krystal Barter?’ The doctor called my name out into the waiting room.

  Mum and I scuttled into his surgery.

  ‘Now, you understand the implications of today’s blood test, don’t you, Krystal? We may well find out that you have a significantly heightened risk of breast cancer.’ These were the first words out of the guy’s mouth and each one landed on me like a physical blow.

  Even though I didn’t really understand the ramifications of what he was saying at the time, the severity of his tone couldn’t be missed. Clearly, whatever these choices involved, it was scary. Nevertheless, I tried to appear nonchalant.

  ‘Sure, whatevs.’

  ‘And it may take several months before we receive the results from the lab,’ he went on, before explaining the inner workings of the laboratory’s testing process.

  I shrugged.

  ‘Okay, well, if you’re ready to do this, then it’s just a case of a simple blood test.’ He stood up and began going through the motions. ‘Just a quick prick,’ he muttered, pulling the cap off the needle with his teeth.

  Mum gripped my left hand. It wasn’t like I hadn’t had a blood test or injections before, but this time I watched the tip of the needle with detached fascination. Who’d have thought that a small vial of my blood could predict my whole future? A few dark red stains on a glass slide under a microscope (specifically, a gene DNA analyser) and some doctor could tell me with confidence whether I was free to get married and have kids and enjoy a long life uninterrupted by disease, or if I was d
estined to live a lifetime condemned to sickness and chemo and losing my hair and dying young. It’s like I’d stepped into some strange parallel universe where suddenly my whole existence was mapped out for me and I had no choice but to follow the yellow brick road that lay in front of me. Only, unlike my beloved Judy Garland, I wasn’t off to see the wizard, I was more than likely off to be diagnosed with cancer, if not now then someday soon. It was too much.

  ‘Stop!’ I yelled. ‘I can’t do it!’

  The doctor froze, needle mid-air, his face one of astonishment.

  ‘Krystal!’ Mum admonished.

  ‘Don’t make me do it! Don’t make me do it!’ I shouted and burst into tears as I stood up. ‘I’m not ready for this!’

  In a hysterical state I raced to the surgery door and yanked it open. Mum and the doctor just looked at one another in stunned silence.

  ‘I don’t want to do this!’ I yelled, and ran through the waiting room full of now-surprised patients and out of the building. My drama queen had taken over.

  I never did go back to that doctor to have my BRCA test. In fact, it was years before I went to any doctor to try the test again. As I pointed out to Mum that day (albeit, at about 100 decibels and in an embarrassingly public place), I just wasn’t ready to handle that sort of information. I wouldn’t have coped. If I was going to follow in my mother’s footsteps and develop early-onset breast cancer—as all the signs, terrifyingly, indicated I would—then I simply didn’t want to know about it yet. People would often comment how I looked so much like Mum, or how we had the same voice, so it made sense to me that I’d inherited her cancer gene as well. And if I did? Well, I preferred to live in blissful ignorance. Even though my version of blissful ignorance about cancer-induced early death was, ironically, to party like there was no tomorrow.