Angie was my best friend in high school, in Geelong. We clung to each other, walking together through the black ice of unrestrained adolescence.
We both had single mothers. He was telling his strict mother that he was having a sleepover at my house on a Saturday night and we were actually hitchhiking in the beach town of Torquay. There we would drink Moselle on the sand dunes and sacrifice ourselves blindly to surfer boys who would never remember our names.
16-year-old Julianne O'Brien.
Angie and I are now 60, connected on Facebook and now on the phone.
First, he apologizes for the repetitive nature of his dialogue. He talks in short loops and keeps coming back to the same story again. He has brain damage, lives with an inoperable brain tumor, alcoholism, short-term memory loss and ADHD diagnosed at age 42. That diagnosis made sense to her, and hearing it now, it made sense to me. He had certainly shown poor impulse control in our wild days when I was out of breath to keep up with him.
I ask him how he acquired his brain injury, but he doesn't remember.
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She had five children with two abusive husbands. Her first husband hit her head against a wall twice. He once dragged her down his street by her beautiful hair. A man watering his garden turned the hose on them like dogs when the coward could have stepped in to help the woman.
Angie's 26-year-old daughter has just been released from prison in Brisbane, but she won't tell her mum what she was up to.
But Angie is not without a glimpse of the past. He tells me he thinks his mother was jealous of him. I completely agree with that. I can still see his mother chasing us out of the house, clumsily on the steel clamps she had to wear because of childhood polio, shouting that I was a “bad influence”! I think she was jealous of Angie, who was effortlessly beautiful, refreshingly oblivious, blooming to bursting, and full of potential.
