Reckoning

In 1973, Magda hits puberty; in no time, she is known as “the one with the big tits.” Croydon becomes more populated, and crews arrive to pave the dirt roads. The new roads bring more cars to the neighborhood. While Magda enjoys the new bowling rink and shops, she resents that her country life has become suburbia.  

Despite its modernization, Croydon is a desolate wasteland. Gangs of “sharpies” form—people who wear their hair in mullets and go around dancing provocatively and committing random acts of violence. The sharpie gangs have no objective besides mindless violence. Once, Chris rescues a man whom sharpies jumped on, breaking his pelvis.

Magda’s home life is as desolate as the suburbs. Although Peter has escaped cancer, the years of fear his illness caused wears on the family. Chris throws himself into cars and fills the garage with million-horsepower engines. Margaret, depressed and menopausal, sleeps all day. Peter, who has no sympathy for Margaret, spends his time at the tennis club. In bitter fights that Magda can hear through the thin walls, Margaret accuses Peter of having an affair.

When Barb moves into a flat in South Yarra, Peter stops speaking to her. This exile upsets Magda, who looks up to Barb as her “groovy” sister; ten years older than Magda, Barb knows everything about boys and sex. At first, Barb rides her motorbike to Croydon every week, but these trips soon become less frequent.

Magda wants to go to Croydon High, but, because her grades are good and Croydon has a bad reputation, Peter wants to send her to Siena Convent, where Izabella goes. Peter insists that it is a “sin” to waste a good brain. To catch the bus to Siena, Magda would have to leave early and would not get home until late; she would not be able to see her friends during the week. Although she briefly considers failing the entrance exam on purpose, Magda feels gratified when she passes; however, she hates that she is a vessel for Peter’s unfulfilled dreams. Nonetheless, Magda is popular at Siena and befriends many girls.

Inspired to gain independence by a feminist book, Margaret gets her driver’s license and a job as a live-in nanny. For six week stretches, Magda is left alone with Peter and Chris. Magda resents her parents’ selfishness, but this soon hardens into indifference. Margaret and Peter had been fighting so much that Magda wants them to get a divorce. However, while Peter and Margaret’s love is not showy, it is steadfast. When the family visits Margaret, Magda is proud and jealous of how much Margaret is loved by the family she works for.

Having no bike, Magda has to “book” Peter to drive her into town. Once, Peter starts the lawnmower at the agreed time, seemingly to get revenge for some past slight by making Magda late. Feeling like a prisoner, Magda yells at Peter. When Peter is unphased, Magda begins the long, hot walk to town, as she wants Bowie’s new single “Sorrow” on vinyl. Although Magda’s desires are often vague and mysterious to her, the song’s haunting sadness resonates with her loneliness; she is also intrigued by the androgynous photo of Bowie and Twiggy on the cover.

Magda and her best friend Kerry listen to the Bowie album repeatedly. Kerry suggests that she and Magda kiss as practice for kissing boys. Magda secretly loves the kissing sessions; she wants to tell Kerry how she feels, but is also desperate to hide her “lezzo” nature. Her desires like jammed signals, Magda rebukes herself for being unable to change this “creepy” part of herself. Similarly, when Magda gets outstanding grades, she feels like a fraud. In all areas of life, she wants to be freed from “the prison of her false self.”

Kerry, who is part of the sharpie gang at Croydon High, decides to transform Magda; she makes Magda a shopping list of things she’ll need to dress the part of a sharpie—canvas jeans, platform heels, and a cropped cardigan, among other things. Magda gets everything on the list but refuses to get the sharpie haircut: a cross between a mullet and a skinhead. Magda doesn’t have any pocket money, and she tricks Margaret into paying for her to get her ears pierced. She practices hunching her shoulders when she walks and using sharpie expression such as “shit, eh?”

At Kerry’s suggestion, Magda slouches around near some sharpies until they accept her into their gang. At Kooyong that year, Magda slouches past her former doubles partner, Lizzie, in her new outfit. That night, Lizzie calls and asks Magda to play doubles with her again. Magda feels a surge of power, and she hopes that Kerry sees her as powerful. Despite all this, Magda is never fully a sharpie; when her sharpie friends swim in the river or throw beer cans at trains, she feels like a tag-along. Once, she throws up from too much Marsala and Coke, which she drank often to cover her shyness over her weight gain.

The leader of the Croydon sharpies, Shane, is neither handsome nor strong; however, everyone reveres him. Then, a member named Tiny tell Magda that Shane reads the newspaper. Visiting Shane’s house for the first time, Magda sees a copy of the Age among the beer cans. Magda, in the present, notes that she’ll never forget the awe on Tiny’s face when he talked about Shane’s intelligence.

Every weekend, Magda and Kerry walk dangerously along the train tracks to the mall where they look for boys. Although Magda likes clean-cut boys like the Brady Bunch boys, Kerry teaches her to like “bad boys.” Magda meets a boy named Sasha, who is two years older than Magda and smokes cigarettes among Polish migrants with whom her family socializes. Sasha’s parents, Bogdan and Dorota, drink and drive, and Bogdan often flirts with teenaged girls. Soon, Magda and Sasha, whom Kerry approves of, ride the train to school together. Magda’s relationship with Sasha makes her feel safe from her feelings for Kerry.

One day, Magda waits on the train platform, hoping to catch a “red rattler”—a train with open doors, allowing passengers to stand in the wind. While she waits, Magda worries about why she has seen less of Sasha lately. A train comes, and Magda gets on. When Magda thinks that everyone has gotten off, she hears the predatory sharpie phrase: “what are you fucken starin’ at?” A girl with bleached hair and four-inch heels leans over Magda. Magda braces herself, but the train lurches, and the sharpie falls to the other end of the car. To the sharpie’s rage, Magda laughs. Luckily, the train reaches the station, and Magda deboards to safety.

One day, Chris picks Magda and Kerry up from tennis in the family car. Magda and Kerry sit in the back seats without seatbelts (no one wears seatbelts in the 1970s). As they drive, a car swerves into Chris’s lane, and the two cars collide. When Magda comes to, she is on the floor, Chris’s seat having blocked her from most of the impact. Magda tries to rouse Kerry, whose face is smashed. Magda screams that Kerry is dead. On Chris’s orders, Magda goes to the gas station to call her parents; she speaks politely to Margaret on the phone, unable to feel any emotion. After she hangs up, she realizes that her leg is bleeding.

Finally, the ambulance arrives. Kerry is not dead, but she’s broken many bones. Magda is taken home and put to bed, where she finally begins to shake. She goes to her parents, who are socializing with some friends. Wilma comforts Magda, and her Scottish accent makes Magda devolve into hysterical laughter. From then on, Magda’s Scottish accent—which she had never mastered—is perfect. After the accident, everything changes. Magda and Kerry drift apart, and Sasha breaks up with Magda; Magda doesn’t know which rejection—the public one from Sasha or the private one from Kerry—hurts more.