Halfway through the days of our lives
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 13: The Next Big Thing
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Kimberley Starr
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Kimberley Starr's biography and other articles by this writer
A few weeks ago, I almost killed my baby. I was driving out of Brisbane's CBD, on a steep downhill slope towards the expressway in the morning rain, when my brakes failed. With my car hurtling like a pinball from one side barrier to another, it took a few dumb moments for me to understand what was happening. As my foot explored the brake pedal, I thought: "This is it. This is how it ends for me." And my baby, who the day before had erupted his first two teeth, this was how life would end for him too, just after it began. I imagined the car flipping on to its roof or over the side barrier into the river. Time after time, we hit a side barrier and ricocheted towards its opposite. The speeding traffic of the expressway was closer and closer. Almost at the bottom, the ramp flattens. I projected myself forward even faster than we were travelling. I was in the future, looking back. I saw that this was the moment when I could act differently, and change things.
Then I was back in the present, in the out-of-control car. This was the moment. We hit the wall again. The road was almost flat by now. I pulled on the handbrake instead of pumping the pedal. Was it skilful driving? A miracle? Had the slope finally levelled so that, without acceleration, we would have stopped anyway? Metres away from the splashes the trucks and the buses made as they sped through the rain, the car stopped. I squealed on my horn. I wanted to be heard. I switched on my hazard lights. I reached for my mobile telephone and pressed redial and screamed something at my husband, and slumped forward over the wheel waiting for whatever would happen next. In the back seat, softly, my baby began to cry.
1985. "I BELIEVE THE CHILDREN ARE OUR FUTURE," sang a young Whitney Houston, now believed to be in drug rehab and broke. "Teach them well and let them lead the way." I was fifteen years old and it was International Youth Year, just as in 1979 I had been nine when it was the International Year of the Child. It had been our year, internationally, for most of the time that we were growing up. People of my generation now, when I ask about it, don't remember that. We are pulled there from time to time when the radio reminds us to wake George Michael up before we go-go or a former classmate sends a surprise email, but the 1980s have faded into a dark age, after the end of history books but before the advent of the internet. Lost years. What information I can find tells me that there were 922 million people aged between fifteen and twenty-four in 1984. We were nearly a fifth of the world's population, four out of five of us living in less developed regions.
My family lived in Canberra in one of the new suburbs scattered around the base of Tuggeranong's parched Mount Taylor. My father was planning a move to older, more sophisticated Sydney. I was bookish. I kept a diary, writing in bed at night lying on my stomach. "I dislike old houses," I wrote in January, contemplating a future home. "They have seen girls like me grow up and I want to be the first girl that my house sees." Youth is always brand new to those who have it.
Friendsreunited.com.au has a list of about fifty names that could be a class roll from Ms Ryan's English class or Miss Ludwig's science class, circa 1984. More people have registered on the website than remember those classrooms. I don't know if anyone else remembers that the walls were coloured so rowdy classes would face the calm of blue, while uninterested students were stimulated with red walls. I described them in my diary.
Here it is, that diary, a letter to me from a younger version of myself. Reading it, I revisit the school and my home, my room, friends, dreams, hopes and activities that were my daily life. It is a letter from my younger self to a person I didn't yet know and now have become. She reveals and retreats, one moment confident, the next mysterious, only revealing as much of herself as she chooses. A fifteen-year-old version of myself exists in its pages, scribbled in writing that's almost recognisable as mine. I lean over her shoulder to watch as she writes, so close I'm surprised Younger Me doesn't look up, unlined face, thicker hair, startled. My diary: in my hand now – as it was then – physical, real. My hands are browner, ringed, but the same hands. There is the callus on the pen-leaning side of my longest finger, a burn scar on my thumb that I hid when I was fifteen. No wonder looking at your hands is so often evoked by poets to express the passing of time. Keats offers us his "living hand, now warm and capable/ Of honest grasping"; Poe watches weeping as time's grains of sand seep between his fingers.
In these pages in my hand, perhaps I will find answers to the questions that have concerned me even more since I considered my child's mortality and realised how much of my own childhood I have left behind. We, the youth of International Youth Year, are in our mid-thirties now. The days of our lives, so the Bible tells us, shall be three score and ten: we are halfway through; we have reached the place where a drama would pause for intermission, or a football ref would blow the whistle for half-time, and we would mill around the foyer sipping Chardonnay, or the food stalls ordering pies, and debating what we think of it all so far.
So what do we think of it? Did we have goals and are we on our way to them, or don't we believe in them any more? How is adulthood working for the youth of International Youth Year? This is already the future. What would the me of 1985 have made of it? Is she happy with the way things turned out?