Going to school in mother’s makeup
Sixteen years old, I leave my home one morning and walk toward the main street. There's a small valley that Epping Road traverses before it rises to the Pacific Highway, spine of Sydney's northern suburbs. The bus swoops down the far side and up toward me, easing down gears to a halt. A regular bus: not the school special, which I have missed. I am alone getting on here, but it is crowded.
I climb aboard. Gripping a pole, we lurch onward toward Saint Leonards and Crows Nest, before we reach North Sydney, my destination, where I am nearing the end of six years of high school.
I am hot with discomfort. I glance furtively around; not as many people are staring as I have anticipated. Relief seeps through me.
My shoes are pink. My jeans are midnight blue and, because I wasn't satisfied with their straight-legged fit, I have taken them in, to envelop my skinny calves. I have donned my favourite, pale lemon-yellow shirt, buttons on a diagonal. It is the coolest thing I own, inspired by New Wave B-listers, A Flock of Seagulls. My hair has tiny ribboned details, a nod to Adam and The Ants performing Stand and Deliver.
But most important is the makeup. I know nothing about it, have no-one to show me how to use it, and own none, so I have pilfered what I can from my mother’s Spartan collection. I doubt she has missed it or noticed – I never saw her apply any. Now, leaning and lurching along the clogged highway in a packed bus, I am wearing it. It’s not too abysmal. I have been hoping to achieve David Bowie or Toyah Willcox, but what I have come up with is less than that. Plucked and coloured eyebrows are the most exotic feature, achieved using lurid aerosol hair tint, bought at a local chemist and applied somehow without blinding myself.
I lift the look by being the first among the over six hundred boys (and zero girls) at my school to get my ear pierced. I am sporting a single drop earring, which I have crafted with long yellow and blue glass beads to echo the hues of my shirt and jeans.
It is the one day of the year when we don't have to be in uniform at school. Peter is wearing a clown wig. Stephen has on a red pork pie hat. Erik has gelled his hair into vast blonde spikes and is sporting a hand-knitted jumper of lurid coloured stripes. Jack is dressed like Charlie Chaplin. There is a delightful array of threads, but no-one else is wearing foundation.
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(For dreadful videos of the New Romantic styles so influential in my life, you can try Stand and Deliver, or Flock of Seagulls I Ran.
You can read about perhaps the most remarkable of our fancy dressed brigade that school day, Erik Mather, here - sadly, it is his obituary, for he died of cancer at just 44.)
