Start Reading Ellidy Pullin's unforgettable memoir

Start reading Heartstrong by Ellidy Pullin, with Alley Pascoe.

Prologue

It was a sliding doors moment. The night I met Alex ‘Chumpy’ Pullin, he was walking up the stairs as I was heading down. Neither one of us had planned to be at my friend’s twenty-first; I was nursing a sore heart after the end of my first serious relationship and Chumpy was meant to be on a plane but had changed his flight at the last minute.

A couple of days earlier, we had passed each other on another set of stairs at Warriewood Beach on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. I was running up and down the stairs, doing an impromptu bootcamp with some friends, when Chumpy came down to check out the surf. Chumpy had always been on the periphery of my friendship group. We ran in the same circles, but our worlds had never collided. I knew him as the mysterious snowboarder who travelled a lot and would randomly play music at our parties when he was in town. Chumpy wasn’t from Sydney, but he spent the Australian winter training at a special gym in Narrabeen, where I lived. I didn’t know much about him, except that he was hot and talented, and I wanted to know more.

Chumpy looked beautiful that day at the beach, I swear his skin glowed and his eyes sparkled. Meanwhile, I was red and sweaty from running – and a bit giddy from seeing him. I wanted to say more than hi to him, but in that moment, I couldn’t form complete sentences. Later, Chumpy would tell me he had wanted to talk to me too – and I would feel giddy all over again.

My friend Laura Enever’s twenty-first was onesie- themed. I wore a bright pink pyjama onesie that I had borrowed from a friend, and Chumpy was in a much cooler denim jumpsuit that made him look like a full-on mechanic, but hot. Chumpy had an electric energy about him. People were drawn to him, just like I had been on the beach and how I was at the party. It’s not something that’s easy to pinpoint; it’s the way he walked, his effortlessness, his very presence. I wasn’t the only one who saw it, everyone who met him felt the same. Chumpy was larger than life, 

I always told him he was beyond this world, he radiated at a higher level like he was from a different dimension to the rest of us. When you looked into his eyes, there was a depth that was other-worldly.

In typical rom-com fashion, the night of the party, our eyes kept meeting across the room and eventually our bodies met in the middle of the dance floor. ‘Wild Ones’ by Flo Rida featuring Sia was playing over the speaker, but all I could hear was the sound of my heart beating. All night, we danced and talked and kissed. Later, my friends would tell me they watched me on the dance floor and saw me fall in love right in front of them.

From our first kiss on that dance floor, it was on. It felt like we were two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that fitted together perfectly. We just clicked. Everything felt right, even the date of our first official meeting was perfect: 10/11/12. I have the date engraved on the gold pendant that my friends had made for me, which I wear around my neck every day. It has an imprint of Chumpy’s fingerprint on the other side.

With Chumpy, there was no playing hard to get or waiting a certain amount of time before writing back to each other. He messaged me on Facebook (as you did in 2012) as soon as he got home from the party, in the early hours of the morning, and we didn’t stop talking. We chatted about the small stuff – his training and my university studies – and the big things – our hopes and dreams for the future. The more I learned about Chumpy, the harder I fell.

Alex Pullin: Really fun hanging out with you tonight. Bummer I’m out of here soon, but have to catch up more next time.

Ellidy Vlug: Yeah me too. Had lots of fun!!!! Would love to catch up again. When do you fly to Austria? Memory is a tad blurry haha xx

Alex Pullin: I’ve just arrived back home on the south coast, then I’m flying to Austria next weekend. What’s your exam schedule like? Pretty hectic for the week I guess? You should maybe just come on tour with me. haha

Ellidy Vlug: Sounds like fun. Busy busy, I woke up 3 am this morning to get a start on the studying. I’m expecting a few fails. Argh!

Alex Pullin: I wish we had been so clever to work this out while I was on the Beaches for six weeks. If only I’d known, I would have worn my onesie out earlier. Haha. I might be back in Sydney for New Years. Either way, whenever we get to meet up again, I’m already looking forward to it. You have had my head spinning since last Saturday.

Ellidy Vlug: Sucks so much our timing hasn’t worked out! I’ll be in New York in February and back in L.A. in May, then Vegas for my 21st. Hopefully you can show me around. I wanna kiss you again!!

Alex Pullin: I’ll happily kiss you again in any of those places around the world. But preferably right now.

On a night out a week later, I was reading through the messages with my friends – as you do when you’re young and crushed-up – and they were gushing about how perfect Chumpy was, how special he was for being so in touch with his emotions and how good we were together.

Chumpy had flown to Victoria after the party and was in Melbourne, preparing to head overseas for the snow season. I was complaining to my friends that he only had a couple of days left in the country when two of them made an executive decision. Maia and Mel hijacked my phone and booked me a flight to Melbourne for the next afternoon.

‘You have to be with this guy,’ Maia said. ‘You are amazing together and if you don’t see him before he goes, you’ll regret it.’

The next day, when my friends drove me to the airport, I did regret one thing: how many drinks we’d had the night before.

‘What kind of weirdo books a flight interstate to see a guy she’s met once?’ I thought. ‘Will it be awkward? What if I’ve built up this pen pal relationship into something it’s not?’ I had never been more nervous.

I didn’t tell my mum or my other friends what I was doing in case they thought I was mad. I was twenty and a grown-up, but I still felt like I was doing something sneaky. When my friends dropped me off at the departures terminal, I was like a little kid on her first day of school, full of anxiety, excitement and butterflies. I felt like a wreck after a night of dancing, and I remember spending the flight putting in eye drops to try to look semi-presentable. As soon as I saw Chumpy waiting for me at the airport gate, all my fears disappeared. Well, almost. When we hugged, I was still shaking with nerves. But he was too! Chumpy held me until we both stopped rattling in our boots. It felt like we already knew each other because we’d been talking constantly, but being in his presence took it to a whole other level.

Then he took me back to his airport hotel room, and we didn’t leave it for the next twenty-four hours. Chumpy sat on the bed and played the guitar, serenading me with songs he’d written. It could’ve been cheesy, but it wasn’t. It felt natural. I smiled so much my face hurt. We ordered enough room service to feed a family of four and sat side by side, eating and chatting. I wanted time to stop so I could stay under the crisp white sheets with Chumpy forever.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the power to warp time. The sun rose the next morning and Chumpy boarded his flight to the other side of the world for a month-long trip. Of course I was sad but, more than anything, I was blissfully happy. The connection I had with Chumpy was real and no matter the distance between us, I knew we’d be together. I felt it in my bones, in my heart and in my fingertips, which had somehow always managed to find Chumpy’s hand when we were together. If I wasn’t so loved up, I would have rolled my eyes at how smitten I was.

I hadn’t grown up with a shining example of true love. My parents, Pete, a police sergeant turned actor and model, and Karen, also a police officer who became a seamstress and fashion designer, separated when I was one and my brother, Dave, was three. I’m glad I was too little to remember that time, because it was volatile. My brother and I lived with our mum in Narrabeen and stayed with our dad every second weekend at his house in nearby Warriewood. It was so close, I could finish dinner at one house and run to the other for dessert.

When I was eight, Mum met my stepdad. That was hard because I was so used to just Mum and Dad in my life. My stepdad and I were very different.

As a kid, you think everyone’s family is the same. You assume everyone orders their cutlery drawer with the knives on the left, forks on the right and spoons in the middle because that’s how your mum does it. You figure all people call swimwear swimmers because you’ve never heard them called togs or bathers or cossies. In the same way, I thought having divorced parents, a stepdad and a sometimes tense household was normal.

I’d never really seen true love, so how could I have known it existed?

Chumpy’s version of how we met was several years before the onesie party, at the Mona Vale Hotel. Back then – before it became the bourgeois Park House, with exposed brickwork, indoor plants and barrel-aged cocktails – the Mona (as us locals called it) was a classic pub with a boisterous beer garden, sleazy sports bar and sweaty dance floor. It was where me and my friends spent all of our Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights (using fake IDs to get in and going to school hungover on Fridays). Our drink of choice was this sickly sweet cocktail slushie called the Purple Sneaker. It was there, at the Mona, where Chumpy told me he first saw me.

‘You were wearing a blue velvet jacket,’ he’d say. My mum had made me that jacket and I wore it everywhere in my late teens, running amok with my friends, young and dancing like nobody was watching. Chumpy told me he spotted me through the crowd one night when he’d just started coming to the Northern Beaches to train at his gym. Apparently he tried to talk to me at the bar – and I gave him nothing. I would have been totally oblivious, too busy having fun with my friends, being a brat and not caring about boys.

It still makes my heart flutter to think of Chumpy sliding up next to me at the bar and brushing up against my velvet jacket, and that he remembered the moment all those years before so clearly. We’d both known of each other before we’d properly met, but I’d had no idea Chumpy was as aware of me as I was of him.

If you believe in the universe having a plan, it’s easy to think our orbits were always meant to collide. We came close so many times before the night we crashed into one another and didn’t let go.

Chumpy learned to love from his parents, Chris and Sally, who simply adore and cherish each other. I’d never met a couple so together until I met Chumpy’s parents in 2013, at their home in Eden on the New South Wales south coast. Suddenly, all of Chumpy’s passion and devotion made complete sense. He looked at me the same way his dad looked at his mum. He wanted to know every inch of my soul in the same way his mum knew the intricate details of his dad’s mind, the calluses on his palms and the frown lines on his forehead.

We came from starkly different backgrounds. Chumpy spent the Christmas of 2013 with his family in Eden, and I stayed on the Northern Beaches in Sydney. I imagined the four of them – Chris, Sal, Chump and his sister, Emma – carefully opening their presents and reading their cards from each other. Meanwhile, I spent the day with my dad, eating Hungry Jack’s for Christmas lunch. Dave was working so Dad and I took him a Whopper meal. I know that Christmas was very different to many other people’s, but I loved that day with Dad. I didn’t tell Chumpy about it for years because I was embarrassed about how low-key our Christmas was compared to his.

As close as Chump was with his parents, he was even closer to Emma. They played music together, wrote lyrics and shared a secret sibling language of raised eyebrows and stifled smiles. The Pullins’ sense of family was like nothing I’d ever known.

Chumpy grew up above a ski hire shop in Mansfield, near Mount Buller. The family didn’t have much, but they had each other. Chris and Sally would work hard through 

the snow season in the hopes of being able to afford a family holiday sailing during the summer. Chumpy loved the snow, but he also loved the sea. As a kid, he was more fish than human. He pretty much learned to swim before he walked, and grew up rowing, sailing and steering boats. Em called him ‘Brother Fish’, which seems ironic now. If only Chumpy could have breathed underwater.

Chris and Sally did everything for their kids and encouraged Chumpy’s love of snowboarding, even when times were tough and money was tight. They were never short of time or love for their kids, and that shone through Chumpy. He inherited his dad’s curiosity, sense  of adventure and love of the ocean and his mum’s love of music and native birds. From both of them he learned a connection to nature and how to love deeply.

He saw the way his parents loved each other unconditionally, and he in turn learned to love unconditionally. Chumpy’s parents taught him how to treat a partner: with care, honesty and generosity. They weren’t rules written down on a blackboard; they were traits taught through actions.

Chumpy loved with his whole heart. And I still can’t believe I’m the girl his heart chose.

Whether we met on a set of stairs at a warehouse party or at the bar of the Mona Vale Hotel, we were drawn together for a reason. And whether I was wearing a borrowed pink onesie or the blue velvet jacket my mum made me, it was love at first sight when I saw Chumpy and he saw me.

I still have the jacket. I don’t have Chumpy.