The day my friend shat herself on Hindley street
I can clearly remember the very first time I ever admitted to anyone that I was insecure.
I was 16 years old and my friends and I somehow infiltrated an older, cooler group of friends and we all went to a party. We were super excited because these older friends were grungy and cool and seemed like they took lots of drugs. We arrived to pre drinks a little late and in my nervousness I drank wine mixed with gin – stolen from parents of course – as quickly as I could to catch up to everyone else. Suddenly I was hysterically crying in the corner, people who only knew me as that super shy girl who never spoke and who blushed when addressed hovered around awkwardly wondering what the hell was going on.
Those that stayed with me heard a barrage of the most normal teenage feelings of self-loathing and insecurity but turned up to about 300% intensity because they had never before been uttered out loud. It was super basic stuff, but to me it was all the things that made me freakishly different and wildly disadvantaged compared to the rest of the world. I wasn’t fat enough to be proper fat but I wasn’t thin enough to be ‘normal’, I was sweatier than normal girls, I had a moustache that I was at once devastatingly embarrassed of and determined not to be pressured to groom.
It was a mortifying experience that I regretted for months afterwards, how could I have been so vulnerable?
I had a friend called Mary whose vulnerability used to terrify me.
These days when I reflect on Mary and the way she moved through the world I feel a sense of admiration for how much of herself she exposed. I also feel devastated because she died just before she turned sixteen.
A warning to those that may be affected by themes of depression, self-harm and suicide, the following story is a bit funny because there is some teenage antics and poo in a bag, but it’s a snippet of much bigger, very tragic story. And for those of you who knew me as a teenager, you may well have known Mary too and if hearing about her is too sad then maybe don’t read this story.
Names have been changed, but if you know who it’s about, you know who it’s about.
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We were at wonderful stage of life where our parents trusted us to catch the bus into the city after school, get changed out of school uniforms and hang out for a few hours – as long as we caught the last bus back to Mylor at 5.30. One Friday we were particularly excited, the usual after school crew acquired a new non-hills member for the evening and the four of us were going to watch a local theatre performance in the hills. After the show, city friend, Mary, and the other two were going to come and sleep over at my house. Exciting times.
As soon as we got to town we headed straight to our preferred public toilets to quickly change out of our uniforms and into our carefully selected alternative fashion ensembles. Mary went for the classic green and yellow horizontal striped flared pants (purchased at WOMAD, I had a matching pair) underneath a pink tie dyed slip and with a brightly coloured 100% polyester shirt. I selected a brown 100% polyester floor length skirt which I daringly paired with a red boob tube which was almost completely covered underneath a several sizes too big, pinstriped men’s suit jacket. Tie dyed cheese cloth headband to top off the look. Indiana was sporting a homemade fluffy headband and the classic long sleeved shirt under short sleeved t-shirt as well as the standard skirt over flared pants. Erin only wanted to dip a toe into ‘being alternative’, she tolerated our weirdness outside of school but once we were on campus we lived in different worlds. She was repping a small, midriff t-shirt and khaki miniskirt.
Satisfied that we looked extremely hip, we set off into the mall in search of business to attend to. Usually we would head to the supermarket and buy discounted sandwiches or bread and dip, other times would check out the Harris Scarf pet shop and coo over all the puppies and kittens. If we had some cash we might go the reject shop and buy junk to do weird little public engagement activities. Once we bought 100 clothes pegs and wrote special messages on them, a broad spectrum of things ranging from ‘blessed be’ to ‘bog off’ or ‘The White Stripes Rule’. Then we would hand them out to strangers and gleefully congratulate ourselves on how wacky we were.
On this particular day we headed to our favourite Goodwill second hand clothing store on Hindley Street to search for fun treasures. The elderly volunteers who ran the store knew us well. We all had our own routines for scouring through the racks of clothing. Even Erin knew how to op shop despite her dedication to pretending to be a ‘normal’. I came across a floral, orange, calf length dress that buttoned up off centre, it was like a kimono crossed with a sixties pant suit. It fit me perfectly, which in those days meant it was 2 or 3 sizes too big for me. I declared that it was my greatest op shop success yet. Sandy at the counter picked it up making a big show of disgust when I proudly placed it in front of her. “I remember pricing this thing, I thought to me-self, geez that’s ugly whose gonna buy this? Now a young girl is buying it? My goodness!” I assured her that it was actually really fashion forward and beautiful but she wouldn’t have it. Erin presented a lumpy knitted jumper with silver thread woven into it, Sandy was much more enthusiastic about this purchase.
We stepped outside into the sunlight and I noticed that it was ten past five. “We better head to the bus stop” I urged the group, anxious that we would miss the bus and miss seeing my bus crush. As we started walking up Hindley Street Mary suddenly gasped and sprinted off in the opposite direction, “back in a minute!!!!!” she called behind her.
Five, then ten minutes passed. I was getting irritated and antsy, “how long has it been?” I asked Indiana for the hundredth time, “it’s 5.21”. I was trying to play it cool but I was so annoyed that the bus plan was being thrown out of whack. Where the fuck was Mary? How could she be so inconsiderate? Indiana and Erin chatted happily while I tried to keep a lid on my seething. “It’s 5.35” Indiana told me after I pestered her again. “it doesn’t matter if we get the next bus anyway, the play doesn’t start until 7 o’clock” she reassured me.
When it got to 5.50 something suddenly dawned on me and I became anxious for a different reason. It occurred to me that something might be seriously wrong. Erin and Indi weren’t as close to Mary as I was and there was a lot they didn’t know.
I didn’t fully understand her situation because it was so different to my own. The Mary that burst into my life full of energy, creativity, hair-brained ideas and endless enthusiasm quickly became one of my best friends. We bonded over a love for absurd humour and semi abstract drawing. There were times when her enthusiasm verged on overbearing but it was easy to forgive her because our friendship always felt fun and honest. Mary was very upfront and talked openly about having attempted suicide more times than I could keep track of. During the course of our friendship I saw the physical and mental effects of various different experiments with combinations of anti-depressants, anti-psychotics and anti-anxiety medication. Her dad would make an appearance early in the morning at any sleep over to deliver a ziplock bag with the exact right combination of multi coloured pills for her to take. She’d greet him lovingly, take her pills and he would leave so as not to cramp her style. She wasn’t to be trusted with her meds after an incident on a family camping trip. Mary revealed that of all her suicide attempts, the one that was undeniably the worst was trying to overdose on her meds. She described the fallout, the panic amongst her family members, the ruined holiday, getting her stomach pumped, it sounded so unbelievably shit. I couldn’t compute how my bright partner in crime could have this whole other side that turned so dark seemingly so suddenly. I never saw that side of her, I just had to take her word for it that it was real.
On this afternoon as I stood on Hindley Street with Erin and Indiana I was suddenly hit with the memory of a story Mary had once told me. One day after a psychiatric appointment she had been walking home along the river Torrens with her parents. The Torrens is notoriously filthy, we used to speculate as to how long it would take to get poisoned by the water. Mid conversation Mary started running and threw herself into the Torrens in an attempt to extinguish herself out of existence. When she told the story she seemed shocked and awed by the extremity of the snap decision and by the stupidity of this way to kill yourself, and of course the unnecessary trauma it added to her parents’ already huge back catalogue of fear for her wellbeing.
Had Mary thrown herself in the Torrens again? Or in front of a car? Did we do something wrong? Should I call her parents?
I decided I needed to tell the others about my concerns and workshop some ideas. Just after I finished trying to tactfully outline my concerns without compromising things told to me in confidence, Mary appeared marching up the street. She was dragging a garbage bag and was wearing ill-fitting jeans, an old wind-cheater and broad grin.
‘I just had the most explosive diarrhoea! Oh my god I feel really bad for the bar, I tried to clean it up a bit but I also just had to get out of there. Oh my god wow. I can’t believe that just happened.’
She was so animated as she filled us in. She had just been put on a new kind of medication and it had completely messed with her bowels in the most embarrassing way, she had been feeling crampy for a few hours and had suddenly been hit with the most uncontrollable urge to shit, hence her speedy exit. Unable to find a public toilet she sprinted into a bar, arriving to the bathroom just in time to shit herself in a big way. The problem with flared hippie pants purchased at the World music festival is that they do not retain catastrophic diarrhoea effectively. After desperately trying to contain the situation she wrapped her shit stained slip around her waist and ran back to the Goodwill where she explained her situation to the volunteers. They happily dug up a new outfit for her free of charge, right down to new underwear. They also gave her a garbage bag for her shitty clothes.
I was the only one of us with a mobile phone which I leant to Mary so she could call her dad, I assumed to ask him to pick her up. After a long conversation (I tried not to mentally calculate all the credit that was getting used up) she came back and announced that her dad was so annoying for trying to make her come home, when she was clearly going to go to the play.
We were stunned. She seemed so unfazed by the shitcident, it would have been my actual worst nightmare. I remember once I did the tiniest wee in my pants because my friend’s dog had scared me and I fell over and when asked if I had wet myself rather than admit it and laugh I made up some unrealistic lie about falling in a small patch of water and pretending to be surprised about it. It was one of the most agonising evenings of my life.
Not only did she seem largely unembarrassed, she seemed unconcerned that she was carrying huge bag of actual shit.
And so the four of us jumped on the next 163F bus to Stirling with our giant stinky poo bag. And then we went to the supermarket for snacks and Mylanta with our big poo bag. And then we went to the local theatre to watch Sweeney Todd the Barber with our big bag of poo. We sat in the front row, I was next to Mary, the poo bag was on the seat next to her. I wondered if the actors could smell the stench as strongly as I could and sank guiltily in my seat.
I debriefed with Erin and Indiana on the Monday morning bus. We all agreed that we would have gone home immediately, and that we would have cried. We also agreed that had we not for some reason done that, we would definitely have thrown away the shit covered clothes rather than defend them to the end. We laughed about it but we collectively knew we wouldn’t be laughing at Mary’s expense with anyone else. It was one of those stories that I so desperately wanted to tell but I knew high school was not the place.
To this day, I am mystified by how she dealt with such a savage teenage blow with such determination to overcome a shit situation. It a display of vulnerability that I wasn’t used to being confronted with. It was reassuring that someone was able to just be frank about the state of things but I could not have done it myself.
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I think I was the last one of our friends to see her before she finally succeeded in taking her life. It was probably one of the only times I had seen her in this strange mood, just floating along like a lost cloud. I also somehow managed to completely let her down and didn’t know how to be upfront about it.
I was walking down Rundle Mall with my relatively new boyfriend Sam (the bus crush) and as we passed the Malls Balls, Mary came running towards me excitedly. We hugged and chatted and I asked her what she was up to.
‘Uh, meeting you of course!’
I was clearly shocked, too shocked to pretend I remembered the phone call a few days prior when we had arranged to meet at that exact time. I felt terrible, how had I forgotten the entire phone call? Was I preoccupied with my suddenly active love life? Probably. I apologised and expressed wonder at how we still managed to meet and how lucky that was but she seemed a little blunted by my error. We hung out for a few hours, the three of us, bumping into friends and acquaintances all over town. One of them happened to be a boy a year below us who had inadvertently become a source of extreme heartache for Mary. After a fleeting conversation with him her mood shifted into a different dimension which I suppose she never returned from. She decided to go home and I was a little relieved, I felt guilty and her mood was disconcerting, I didn’t know what to say to restore her to her normal self.
A few days later I was hanging out at Sam’s house with a bunch of his mates from across the street when my mum called for me on the landline. I answered the phone brightly and she blurted out through tears, “Mary killed herself I’m so sorry”. I felt like I was in a movie, I slid down the wall clutching the phone to my face repeating ‘no no no no no’ endlessly. Mum asked if I wanted to come home but I didn’t want to, I felt frozen and just wanted to sit on the couch. One of Sam’s friends put on Black Books, they didn’t know what had just happened and for some reason neither Sam nor I told them. I just sat there numbly pretending to watch while tears poured silently down my cheeks. I wore the orange kimono dress to her funeral.
It occurred to me that I should start blaming myself for Mary’s suicide because of my Mall’s Balls meeting fuck up, or for not taking her weird mood as a warning sign, if only I had called her that night to check in or something, it could have made all the difference. It seemed like the obvious thing to do but I knew deep down it couldn’t possibly have been my fault. There was no one I could blame, and I wasn’t even mad at Mary. I just couldn’t understand how the person I used to go department stores with to fantasy buy the perfect crockery for our future post high school share house could suddenly disappear. I think the reason I wanted to tell this story through the explosive diarrhoea lens was to add a little humour because it’s still incredibly painful to think about, and because it’s a powerful example of how resilient Mary was, what teenager doesn’t consider shitting themselves in public the ultimate disaster?
I used to often wonder if she would have beaten this thing or if it would have haunted her for the rest of her life, I used to wonder if it hadn’t been for all the different meds that fucked her up all the time, some of them seeming to make things much worse before they started doing what they were supposed to do – would things even have escalated so much? I don’t wonder about it anymore but I cry every time there’s a suicide attempt in a film or a book.
Throughout my twenties I thought I could save people by throwing away everything I had going on to look after them but then I realised that I was turning myself into an unhappy person. Now I tend to distance myself from those who are struggling which sometimes feels lazy or unkind, I’m not quite sure. My biggest fear is that one of my children will suffer from depression like Mary did because no matter what a good mum I am, I can’t magically fix someone else’s mental health.
