The Boy Who Always Smiles picks up the story upon my graduation from rehab. I return to Australia, spending most of the next ten years backpacking. I find ‘home’ amongst the other backpackers, and feel liberated, young and free. It is an exciting and fun environment with lots of adventures. I feel I have dodged a bullet in rehab, and relieved that the censorship of my life allowed me to avoid the traumas of my adolescence.
I have found my happiness not only in my friends, but my gypsy nature is as much about being distracted and a means to escape, as it is about being a ‘free spirit’. I am drinking excessively. I move over forty times in ten years. To a large extent my sexuality remains a secret, although there are desperate, dangerous moments of indiscriminate and promiscuous sex, and a one-off attempt at prostitution.
As my drinking and other coping mechanisms become more deeply entrenched, this part of the book reaches its climax when a disgruntled backpacker sets fire to a hostel, killing fifteen of the hostellers in 2000, at Childers, Queensland. This traumatic event triggers flashbacks to my adolescence, when sexual abuse took place. I begin suffering anxiety, flashbacks and insomnia.
I return to my family in New Zealand. This is to become the final destination after ten years of running away. I am home.
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