COMMEMORATION

The beach was less than a block away but ten stories down. I sipped a home mixed rum and cola and felt the knots of my exams ease as I looked across to the tower across the street. Rich people went about their evenings in their own cells and from this distance looked like a wall of tiny televisions. The light outside was a thick dark violet and sinking into black. Mark, whose family owned this flat, stirred some spaghetti in a pot as the sauce simmered and plopped beside it. We'd head out after dinner and go strolling along Broadbeach along with all the other schoolies. I really hoped that Kaye and Maree and their gang had made it down but there was time enough. For the moment I sipped, smiled at the tinkle of ice cubes and let it happen.

We caught up with the others the next day when Wayne and Chris came by. We'd all skipped breakfast and lunch was on the rise so we went to the biggest beer garden I've ever been in with tap beer served in kiosks like remote signal stations. Best steak and chips I'd ever eaten and the beer was cold with a tight bitterness I never taste anymore. What was on that night? Something. It could be a smooth start at a cafe before hitting the night beach for a bonfire. It could be a grey lit den of adolescence where a heavily tripping girl saluted everyone who came in, saying "welcome" in a voice twenty years more weary that she had a right to be. It could be anything. Repeat.

There was a killer on the loose who targeted couples in remote areas. He struck in that very corner of south east Queensland but for some reason he was still a news item, a grey pencil drawing of a man in a Balaclava, cartoon eyes gooping out from the newsprint. Because this is the way these things happen he was called The Balaclava Killer.

Mortality is  not on the menu when you're seventeen. You break and self repair. If you swim with Mako sharks you knew what you were getting into. And we were almost never not in a pack. And it was as a pack that we piled into the Norton Twin Cinemas (I'm making up that name as I only went there once and a long time ago) so see the new horror movie that you had to see. It sounded like Halloween but in the country but that sounded good. Tickets, choctops, a selection of informative shorts and then everything went black and it started. A title card came up with a date, my birthday, as it happens.

You know the deal kids, lust blades and terror. A slasher on the loose. The old timer who seems to have materialised from the walls howls about doom. Someone kills a snake (and it looks real). And the killin' a-starts big. From that point it's blood and screams. I can't remember whose hand it was gripped my wrist in the worst bits but I'm sure it wasn't Kaye or Bernadette. But no time to dream. The final girl, as she would come to be known in slasher knockoffs for the next twenty years, screamed and fled and at last turned, stood and fought. And then there's that ending. It was the most gore I'd ever seen in a movie (Halloween has almost none) and the big finish punched such a gasping thrill out of me I was hooked on the experience. Halloween had been at the drive in but it was nothing like being in this electrified well of survival. 

Nothing was open on the way back to the girls' unit on Mermaid Beach but there was plenty of flowing garbage in casks in the fridge. For the first time that week we thought of the Balaclava Killer. It was as though we had sunk into the first shimmering moments of a nightmare, the same nightmare, shared and pressing. We checked corners that we'd have to turn. Every footfall not our own was his. We were almost silent. Back at the unit we unwound with wine that only had to work. It did. Youhave never been that drunk.

Tomorrow, as I type this, it will be Friday the 13th. That's what I will be watching on its 40th anniversary.