My family and other animus 9780522872767, 9780522872774, 052287276X

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MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia [email protected] www.mup.com.au

First published 2018 Text © James Jeffrey, 2018 Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2018 This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers. Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher. Text and typesetting by Typeskill Cover design by Peter Long Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia

9780522872767 (paperback) 9780522872774 (ebook)

For Daisy and Leo

contents

A blade, a kiss, the blessings of families I Within these four shaking walls 1

When the boat comes in

2

The best way to a man’s heart

3

Motors operandi

4

Judgment daze

5

Mouths of babes

II Caution: ghost sex ahead 6

Of mice and sharks

7

Lest we beget

8

Onion dome dreaming

9

Getting it on

10

Sleepless

11

Off my faith

12

For special occasions

13

Generations

III Out in the world 14

A home among the Gumtree

15

Fists of iron

16

Inflammable material

17

Log off, delete your account

18

More beer, vicar?

19

With this ring

IV The world keeps turning 20

Opal country

21

Morning-after dill

22

Carried away by ants

23

Here’s Johnny

24

Dear Malcolm

25

When the ferry goes out

26

Friendship’s twilight

27

Ticking, tocking

Après Mum, le déluge

a blade, a kiss, the blessings of families

I WAS EIGHT-AND-A-HALF YEARS old the first time I saw a knife raised in anger. It was hard to know what to pay more attention to in the moment: the light glinting off the blade, or the— Hang on, this isn’t right. This is meant to be a book of uplift and joy, of wisdom gleaned from mistakes, of a heart finally softened into a state of understanding about the errors of those who went before. I absolutely cannot start with that knife. Yes, it was a very theatrical moment, as threats of live organ removal in a domestic setting tend to be. And yes, with the benefit of hindsight it was, in addition to being monumentally awful, an education. But it really doesn’t feel like quite the right first step in our adventure together in these pages. Let’s begin, instead, with a kiss. This story started out, to all intents and purposes, as an explanation to my children as to why their parents kiss so much. More specifically, why they kiss so much in front of them. And it is very true to say that they are in search of explanation. Often when my wife, Bel, and I get caught up in the moment, our daughter, Daisy, rolls her teenage eyeballs so hard you can almost hear them. Our son, Leo, himself now entering the hormonal minefield of high school, tends to assume an expression that captures elements of both horror and amusement. And up goes the cry: ‘Mum! Dad! Stop it!’ Their tolerance dips even lower when physical desire manifests itself at the table during dinner, even more so when they have friends visiting. Honestly, kids today. And yet I can tell that at some level they secretly like that we are this way. As far as I see it, there are two main ingredients: mad love, and for my part, the driving instinct never to come close to replicating the wasteland my parents called their marriage. Fear of repetition can be a very powerful thing, and sidestepping every element that went into making that cataclysm has been one of the guiding forces through my life. No part of the carcass has been wasted. But it’s not the only guiding force. One day at The Australian, the newspaper for which I write, I was asked to cough up a few rules for a better life. ‘Rules’ aren’t really my vibe; I prefer to think of what I came up with that night (with the aid of a fiscally responsible cabernet sauvignon) as a grab bag of twenty-one modest suggestions. I have yet to lead by example on the first one, and I have some regrets about not including TISM’s ‘Greg! The Stop Sign!!’ as a possible alternative in No. 6. But the rest feel about right: 1. Get rid of your smartphone before it devours your life. 2. Do not eat while on the phone. Chewing into the mouthpiece is a sign that you, as the representative of an old and proud civilisation, are on the verge of collapse. 3. Leave the music device at home once in a while and throw yourself on the mercy of radio. 4. If you have kids, make sure they see the love flowing between their parents. Don’t be afraid to embarrass them a little. 5. Do something you wouldn’t ordinarily do: go to a footy game or sit in the dark with a bottle of red and listen to a symphony from start to finish. 6. Start all road trips with AC/DC’s ‘It's a Long Way to the Top’. 7. Go to the outback on a moonless night, spread out a picnic blanket and lie under the horizon-to-horizon stars. Your sense of perspective will come out of it the winner. 8. Spend time in the company of animals. 9. Treat your native tongue like an Aston Martin and don’t pootle along in second gear. 10. Don’t talk endlessly about bacon; we get it. 11. Surprise friends with gifts that aren’t tied to any particular occasion. 12. Unless you are dangerously tone deaf, join a big choir and sing Handel’s Messiah at least once in your life; it’s a wonderful way to immerse yourself in the mind of a genius. 13. Refrain from eating at the cinema. You really should be able to get through two hours without enriching the soundtrack with a noise like a wall full of tropical termites. 14. The word ‘inappropriate’ has been destroyed; give its shattered remains a wide berth. 15. There’s no TV show that can’t be improved by watching it from a bubble bath while drinking whisky. 16. If you absolutely must pick a fight, don’t be anonymous. 17. If you think bearing grudges is a good use of your time, travel through the Balkans. 18. See Bronwyn Bishop’s hair in person and marvel anew at our species’ capacities. 19. Letting your heart triumph over your head isn’t necessarily weakness. 20. Try to find the sweetness amid the sorrow, but not vice versa. 21. Don’t be a dick. Recently, Daisy informed me that she and her schoolfriends had stumbled upon the list. I was both chuffed by this, and a little apprehensive. As I sat down to listen to her take on it, I hoped that she would zero in on No. 4, the one emphasising the importance of parents letting their kids see the love flow between them. I wanted her to quiz me on why this was so important. I wanted her to demand why I thought it was even remotely acceptable for mothers and fathers to embarrass their offspring. I wanted her to ask why it hadn’t been at the very top of the list when that would clearly have been in my nature. I wanted to explain that I’d wanted to build up to it a little bit rather than have it peak too early. I wanted to … ‘We all loved the last one,’ Daisy said. ‘“Don’t be a dick”.’ But I could tell she was thinking about No. 4. Really. That we are surrounded by silver linings and little bursts of magic was something I began exploring in my Home Truths columns in The Australian, many of which appear here in one shape or another. I wanted to find the lessons that life, home and family have handed out along the way. I wanted to ponder the unending conveyor belt of ingredients that goes into the work-inprogress that is us. I wanted to celebrate the big joys and all the happinesses that are so tiny we can blink and miss them as they vanish in the maelstroms of our existence. I wanted to embrace family and the very blessing of being alive. And where

need be, I wanted to find the flowers blossoming amid the ruins. In My Family and Other Animus, love and life have beginnings and ends. There is sex and a bit of religion, but almost nothing in the way of politics—so I’ve dodged that particular triple. There are hangovers and real estate, there is the Family Court, there are police and one example of human-to-Kombi violence. One chapter has a shark called Bruce, and many others are wreathed in smoke from my mother’s cigarettes. And then of course there’s that knife, which we will come to presently via a big ship, a small duck and fat envelope.

PART I

I within these four shaking walls

1 when the boat comes in ON A BRIGHT WINTER’S day in 1976 just before I turned four, I arrived in Australia with my family. That we came on a ship was something Dad would eventually concede was a strategic error, because it afforded Mum a good, lingering look at Sydney Harbour. Four long weeks after we’d left England—my British father with some regrets, my Hungarian mother like a donor organ that had refused to take—we all gazed upon this glittering fantasy of water and metropolis like the wonderland it was. A short time later, we were bundled into a car and whisked a few hours up the road to the country town that was home to Dad’s new coal-mining job, which had sponsored us. Mum may have fled three of her demons (Hungary’s communism, England’s rain, her first husband’s existence), but she soon found a new one: screaming boredom in what, following Chekhov’s school of diplomacy when it came to provincial centres that had let down one of his characters, I will refer to as the town of S. Mum had seen that harbour and it haunted her dreams. A new campaign got under way—shorter and even more intense than the one that had driven us from Europe—and within eight months we moved to Sydney. A couple of months shy of the fortieth anniversary of that arrival, Mum was back at the Overseas Passenger Terminal at Circular Quay for the first time, smoking her way through so many cigarettes she had a halo of ash around her like the dust skirts around the craters on the moon. My brother, Laszlo, who’d volunteered to take her on a South Pacific cruise, watched in wonder. ‘You are only allowed to smoke in special places on the ship,’ Mum explained in a tone that expertly combined fear, outrage and indignity. ‘And if they catch you smoking somewhere else, they fine you 250 bucks.’ She said the ‘250 bucks’ in English, though thanks to her accent, the bucks came out sounding like ‘box’. ‘And worse, it is 250 American box!’ Behind us, the ship towered, a daunting expanse of glass and refrigerator white. ‘She’s a big tub,’ Laszlo observed. Certainly bigger than the Australis, which had brought us here in 1976. I looked it up a couple of years back and found that the ship we’d travelled on had been launched by then US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt as the SS America, carried more troops and refugees than any other civilian ship during World War II, and eventually relaxed into a career lugging immigrants from Britain to Australia. Now it is a wreck in the Canary Islands, a storm having spared it from a retirement as a floating hotel in Phuket. More passengers were arriving, some with more oomph than others. A black stretch Hummer disgorged one load of festive young folk. A van pulled in behind, its driver sliding back a door that revealed walls festooned with black shagpile carpet and a luridly pulsating constellation of LED lights, its sound system almost powerful enough to cause ripples in the cerebral fluid of bystanders. Among those who popped out was a bloke with a shiny, goldfish-patterned suit and the requisite swagger. Laszlo mildly expressed uncertainty about the demographic he was about to spend nine days at sea with. But Mum’s attention was elsewhere. As the crowd of her fellow ocean-goers steadily swelled, she pointed at one of her bags. ‘Guess what I have in there,’ she demanded, lighting up a fresh cigarette. ‘What?’ my brother and I asked. Given Mum’s history of ill-fated attempts to smuggle stuff into Australia (salami and cucumber seeds, to name just a couple), we were instantly apprehensive. She took a hearty drag, then spelled out the comically large amount of cash she was lugging. ‘Jesus, Mum, I knew the minibar was expensive …’ Laszlo wheezed. Whereupon Mum corrected herself and named an even larger sum. ‘It is to buy an apartment in Hungary.’ Laszlo: ‘We’re sailing to Noumea, not up the [colourful adjective] Danube!’ ‘Pfft,’ Mum said. ‘It is safer with me.’ The ship headed out into the harbour early in the evening. Unlike that bright day in 1976, the sky was the sort of low, grey, seeping affair Mum had once hoped she’d left in England for good. But her mood was festive. ‘She’s having a ball,’ Laszlo texted me as Australia sank out of view behind them. She’d found the designated smoking spot.

2 the best way to a man’s heart ONE OF THE STANDARD ingredients of courtship’s early stages is the ‘Oh, my family’s a bit weird’ conversation. It tends to be a steadily escalating exchange in which various eccentricities are produced as evidence for a jury of one person, before the most clearly deranged twig in the family tree is brought forth for inspection. It was no different for me and Bel, and we both made our separate cases as to why our own tribe should be considered the further from the norm. As I listened to Bel, I couldn’t help but think, ‘Amateur’. And yet she was not quite swayed by my argument. Actions speak louder than words, so I took her to meet my family. As amusing as the first encounter was (Mum railing out of the blue against adopted kids, me then pretending Bel was adopted), it was one of the following encounters that won the day. It was a family lunch at Mum’s, deep in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire. Mum did not care for the bush nor the animals dwelling within it, but for reasons less than entirely fathomable she had opted to live in a suburb bookended by two national parks. What Bel wasn’t quite aware of as we arrived was that simmering unseen in the background were years and years of tensions between Mum and my big sister, Eszter, over the favouritism that had been shown to Laszlo. It was a subject that found Mum seesawing between denial and a candour that was both bracing and refreshing. A couple of years later, at a big dinner in Hungary, Mum announced to the table, ‘I am so happy because my favourite son arrives tomorrow!’ I was at the table, Laszlo was not. People were horrified on my behalf, but what can you do? Besides, being the favourite comes with its own burdens. And, as lunch that day went on to demonstrate, not being favourite comes with unexpected upswings. Mum did seem a little distracted as she served up the first course—soup divided into lake-like portions—but that wasn’t so out of the ordinary. Then she left the table, only to reappear at Eszter’s side with a wild light in her eyes and a bulging envelope in her hands. Without any further fanfare, or at least a bit of verbal softening up, she cried, ‘This is to make everything right’. Then she plonked the envelope in front of Eszter, where it lay round and swollen with cash, roughly the size of a guinea pig. Eszter was agog, but possibly not as much as Bel. As I watched her jaw enter a sort of holding pattern, I knew one thing was certain: victory was mine. The only bugger about the whole thing was that the bar was set high so early on. The next time we all dined together, Bel sat down with an air of wonder and trepidation. But the wildest thing that happened was merely the third course. Having fed us roughly a gallon of soup that looked like it had had half the cast of Babe drowned in it, followed by a main that featured the star, Mum brought forth the grand finale. ‘Instead of dessert, I have made a surprise,’ she announced, looking at us all expectantly. She lowered it onto the table and there before us a duck lay gently steaming, its legs akimbo, a spiced sphere bulging out of its rear. It looked like it had been killed with a cannonball of stuffing fired at point-blank range. ‘I hope you are all hungry,’ she hinted brightly and wielded her knife. I was eight-and-a-half years old the first time I saw a knife raised in anger. It was hard to know what to pay more attention to in the moment: the light glinting off the blade, or the bulging pallor of the knuckles around the handle. The hand of which the knuckles formed a vital part was in turn attached to an olive-skinned arm, deep into middle age but suddenly and impressively brawny with rage. And attached to the arm was the rest of the woman, who’d suddenly realised my mother was stealing her husband. Unless you speak Hungarian, it’s difficult to convey the particular intensity with which her anger was articulated, the culturally and linguistically specific way in which her soul Krakatoa-ed all over that southern Sydney living room. But the short version is that it included an offer to cut out her husband’s still-beating heart and package it for Mum to take home; an adulterer’s doggie bag, if you will. Up until that moment, I’d never suspected that a suburban barbecue/pool party could go wrong, let alone that wrong. Mind you, I also hadn’t suspected the possibility that marriages were one of those things that could end. Despite the impressive and growing body of evidence my parents had been building over the years—shouting matches, slammed doors, mysterious absences, the ironically festive ding of wedding rings ricocheting off walls—it wasn’t something I’d really thought about. Loveless as it had become, my parents’ marriage was something that was simply there, and probably eternal—like the sky, and the weird smell in the Kombi. So the moment Edit materialised from the kitchen armed with a carving knife, my mind experienced a moment of clarity. I wasn’t alone. I still remember the wall of faces around me spanning the spectrum from consternation to amazement, not least among the kids. It was a Hungarian crowd, but most of the youngsters had been born in Australia. Typical of many migrant communities, there was a split between those who’d been taught their parents’ language and those who hadn’t. I had been taught Hungarian, so I was grateful on some level that this event wasn’t a mystery that would require interpretation after the dust had settled. But as I looked at the other kids’ faces, I understood something else clearly: that knife, with a little help from the body language, transcended the language barrier. It was as though SBS’s yellow subtitles had magically appeared beneath Edit’s face —her eyes filled with a terrible light, her mouth jagged with decibels—and formed the words, ‘I’ll cut out his fucking heart for you!’ More than anything, even the night shortly afterwards when Mum and Dad’s marriage had its pyrotechnic finale, this was the moment in which my old world ended and a new, chaotic one rose in its place. In the days, weeks, months and years to follow, life would take on a seismic instability so filled with madness and strain and vendetta and daftness and acts of love both beautiful and misguided that, decades later, I rarely go a week without thinking about it all. Children are resilient, they like to say. It was tougher on my little sister, Olivia, who was only five. Laszlo and Eszter were nine and ten years older and were relatively clear of the blast. How much so didn’t become clear until one little truth bomb got dropped along the way: Eszter and Laszlo were our halfsiblings. Back in the days when I used to quiz Mum and Dad about how soon after they got married my brother and big sister were born, they always sidestepped it with a nimble elegance that wasn’t usually part of the program. Now all the secrets were being rolled out, the separation of the family under way with the bitter energy of civil war. The penny would eventually drop for me that Eszter and Laszlo had already been through this. Not only were they veterans, they had a father who was not mine, one who still lived in Hungary with a new family of his own. One day he would hear from his first children again, the breaking of a silence that stretched eighteen years, and they would meet again in that town where all their lives had started. In the long run, this new knowledge didn’t change a jot the way I saw my older siblings. But at the time, it was deeply disorientating, one more among the cornucopia of punches I was trying hard to roll with—give or take. There was one sustaining thought. I was just old enough to understand that while my parents’ love for each other was almost

as long-vanished as the seas of Mars, their love for Olivia and me was perfectly intact. Best of all, it was a school in its own right. Somehow, amid the shambles of the work-in-no-progress that was their relationship, Mum and Dad constituted an important if messy learning curve. Like all of us ultimately will be (to some extent at least), they were teachers in the school of humanity’s ups and downs, and they provided a solid mix of lessons on what to do and, just as importantly, what not to do. What else can you do but live and learn? And maybe take a few notes for good measure along the way. I was bright red the night Mum and Dad separated—custodian of a good, old-school sunburn that made me aware of my own skin in a way I hadn’t thought possible. As the bigger drama unfurled, it felt like it had been stretched tight and held over glowing coals. Every time I moved, I was torn between the terrible excitement of the pain, and curiosity as to whether my skin would split open like the shell on a cicada nymph. In my eight-year-old mind, quite a lot of life was viewed through the prism of the cicada’s life cycle. As the trees erupted each summer with their metallic braying, I’d grown curious about these creatures all but invisible among the eucalyptus leaves, avalanching their decibels upon us. During the spring, the nymphs emerged from their subterranean childhoods and dotted trees and fences with constellations of their empty shells. Each one was like a little brown ghost, at once ferocious and comical, and so fragile that even the smallest hand plucking one from a sun-bleached paling risked accidentally pulverising it. As I collected the shells, I slowly but surely became obsessed. ‘Yes, he’s very fond of anything that moves,’ Dad would explain as I expertly cornered another victim and bored them rigid with a full appreciation of the natural wonder that is the cicada. Among my victims were my Dad’s mother and his sister, Liz. My grandmother was from Nottingham (and very proudly so), but answered to ‘Nagyi’, the Hungarian for granny. When her title was being work-shopped early on, she cast aside ‘grandma’ as a poor fit, and ‘granny’ as making her sound too old. And ‘nana’ was just so far beyond the pale she wrinkled her nose. Given her antipathy to Mum and her pronounced lack of interest in matters Magyar, ‘Nagyi’ was a surprising choice. But it stuck. Liz and Nagyi happened to be visiting at the time my parents hit splitsville, but in the days before the cold war turned hot we’d spent time together in the bush, where the cicadas were going at it with particular gusto. ‘They are rather noisy,’ Nagyi had observed. ‘What are they?’ I didn’t need any further invitation and I spilled forth with the full director’s cut. Half an hour later, Nagyi was signalling to be rescued. So yes, cicadas flitted across my mind as my skin sizzled into my awareness that evening. It was Australia Day and Eszter had taken me and Olivia to the beach for the afternoon and, well, we weren’t so aware of melanomas back then. Hell, they still sold cigarette-shaped lollies called ‘Fags’ to kids in those days, so the concept of skin-cancer awareness had a few years of timebiding before it was going to get a look in. It had been a beautiful day, and Cronulla beach was as innocuous a setting as you could want for what proved to be the last day of life as we knew it. We got home, the sun sank below the horizon—and then so did everything else. What followed that night, an event that would live on in my brain for years afterwards under the unimaginatively blunt but accurate title ‘The Big Fight’, remains only in flashes of recollection. At some point in the evening, everything exploded. The tensions that had been building between Mum and Dad since shortly after they were married—and for that matter, the tensions building between Mum and her in-laws—burst their frayed seams. Liz and Nagyi were there, too, probably wishing they were being bored senseless by a young cicada obsessive instead. The setting for the showdown was the kitchen, which, as rooms go, is surely the heart of any household. There, beneath the glare of the twin fluorescent tubes, surrounded by the sheen of formica and the lurid linoleum that appeared to have been patterned on a blood clot, I was presented with my first evidence that adults can be complete dickheads. It was three against one—Mum versus the rest—which struck me as pretty unfair. I remember a slap against Mum, and a kick from her—or have I mentally Photoshopped that in? There was the confused tumult of four voices screaming at each other, and then a fifth: little Olivia crying out, ‘Don’t kill Mummy!’ What happened after that becomes a bit more opaque. Olivia and I were tucked into the bed our parents would never again share, which in hindsight seems a little counterintuitive. There were heavy footsteps and unfamiliar voices. At one point, the bedroom door quietly opened and in stepped a policeman. He looked huge and had a gun hanging off his hip. The bedroom light flashed off all the metallic bits on his jacket and belt; I’d never seen a police uniform up close before. I remember his gentleness. ‘Are you okay, kids?’ he asked, crouching down by the bed. We weren’t, but it’s important in an event like that to be reassured that not all adults have lost their minds. The rest of that night fades, followed by the weird adventure that came with daylight. Liz and Nagyi were gone. I didn’t know it then, but Dad had hurriedly installed them in a nearby motel. They amputated what was left of their holiday and flew back to the safety of England. Back at home, the Siege began. While Dad was out, Mum moved swiftly, almost as if stirred by centuries of ancestral Magyar memory and all the enemies and invasions that entails. Armed with the potty that had served me and Olivia through toddlerhood, she barricaded us into the bigger of the two front bedrooms. A few years ago, when the house had just been sold, I walked through it for the final time. My first thought when I stepped into that room was the Siege. There are few things I can think of that simultaneously arouse such a deep welling of sadness and such a ferocious urge to giggle. At the time, though, there was just this weird sense of adventure. They say a change is as good as a holiday, but it’s hard to say just what sort of trip to which this would equate. The bedroom door was shut and a big wooden wedge jammed under it. The other side of it—the rest of our home and a crucial member of our family—was now enemy territory. A couple of years later, when I learnt about the building of the Berlin Wall, I nodded along knowingly. I don’t know how much Mum remembered from her schooldays in Communist Hungary, but what she didn’t know about indoctrinating us against the enemy within was probably not worth knowing. The sound of Dad’s voice pleading from the other side of the door and the creak of floorboards beneath his tread took on a sense of the sinister. He was a monster and we were right to be scared. Mum seemed pleased with progress here in our miniature re-education camp. And yet, our brains kept reminding us that he was Dad, who loved us to distraction. It wasn’t long before Mum started to entertain the idea of territory expansion. ‘Go open the window and call out to your father,’ she instructed us. ‘When he comes, keep him talking.’ So I went to the window, which doubled as our waste-disposal system. Mum had taken to emptying the potty into the rockery below and, obeying an unshakable curiosity, I looked down to see how things were progressing. There are things from childhood you remember as clearly as if you’ve downloaded a photo into your brain and can click on it at any time. I regret to say that for me, one of those things is a solitary turd perched on a cactus, gleaming in the summer light like a sea cucumber abandoned by the tide. ‘Dad! Dad! Are you there?’ I heard him coming down the steps at the front of the house; one of the steps was wonky and clunked underfoot. (Later in life, stealthy returns home in the small hours required me to be not so drunk that I forgot to step over it. This was easier said than done.) As Dad looked up from the lawn below, pointedly ignoring the rockery, his face was a mosaic of sadness and longing. He

knew what was happening, that I’d been enlisted in the war against him and that he was being done over. All the same, as Mum pulled out the wedge from under the bedroom door and rushed around deadlocking all the others, he kept talking with me and Olivia about all the lovely places we’d go to and all the very fine things we’d do once this was all over. The sound of the front door being deadlocked was theatrically loud. I understood that I was betraying Dad, but he somehow kept in check the disappointment on his face. In that instant, I also understood that he wouldn’t be holding any of this against me. The mood was not so forgiving at the other end of our cul-de-sac. When Dad went off to work (I’m still not sure how he was able to concentrate), Mum would have us scoot out to have a look. ‘Is she there?’ It was a small silver car with tinted windows, and in it, we were told, was Edit. It hardly seemed like any time since Edit had overheard Mum talking in Hungarian to my aunt Joli. Magyar compatriots in the Shire weren’t all that common, and Mum was soon invited for a barbie at the family home. It was there she met her future husband, János, who at the time was still married to Edit. Things moved quickly—pool party, knife—and now as Mum’s marriage lay smouldering, Edit was on her own mission. It’s probably for the best I wasn’t in the car with Mum the time Edit appeared at an intersection—‘Out of nowhere! And screaming!’ Mum would one day reminisce—running over from the footpath to where Mum was in her car waiting for a break in the traffic. Mum always insisted that Edit put her fist straight through the perspex windshield over the driver’s window. I wasn’t there, but if I had been, I suspect it would be lodged in my brain alongside the cactus turd. But despite her industrious efforts, Edit was helpless. Mum was preparing to leave the Siege of Chez Jeffrey, and János—a gruff mechanic with a tussock of black hair and a passion for dogs and fishing and shooting—was about to enter our lives. Dad had left for work a safe period earlier when the removalists arrived. They moved with speed and efficiency, Mum barking orders with the hard-headed precision of a general at war. I was walking around the house, idly wondering what it would be like for Dad to come home to so much space now all the furniture was gone, when Mum turned her attention to me. ‘Your mice,’ she said. ‘Get rid of them.’ ‘Why, Mum?’ ‘They can’t come with us. We are moving to a unit, no pets. Let them go.’ I carried their cage into the front yard, crouched down by the stack of bricks Mum and Dad had bought with the intention of building the underside of the house, and opened the lid to the nesting box. I patted each of my pets in turn and turned them loose among the bricks. There were lots of nooks and crannies and I imagined they’d make a nice life for themselves in there. And that was that. It was time to go. As the diesel engine of the removalist truck rattled into life, one of our vigilant neighbours quietly slipped into her car and prepared to follow. Mum didn’t notice as she bundled us into the family Kombi.

3 motors operandi ‘G’DAY, IS THAT JAMES?’ It was in the spring of 2015 and I was in Tasmania when I took the call. I recognised neither the number nor the voice. Sometimes I hesitate for a moment owning up to being me—I don’t know why; perhaps this is something I can explore with a trained professional somewhere down the track. But there was an excitement in his tone that made me cough up straight away. He enthusiastically introduced himself, then got down to business. ‘Yeah, look, I’ve got a bit of an odd one for you: I think I’ve got your car on my driveway.’ This sentence passed through my brain like a wind-turbine blade, against which all unrelated thoughts were but hapless sparrows thudded mercilessly into the afterlife. ‘I beg your pardon?’ Five months earlier, a couple of nights before I was about to set off on a big desert trip with my family, our car had been stolen from outside our house. That we’d just had three new tyres put on at exhilarating expense a few hours earlier was the pig scat on the cake. At the time, I was unable to transcend my attachment to material objects and wished the person/s responsible an encounter with a syphilis-coated meteorite, and not in a good way. After a couple of months of being grumpy, I reminded myself of the need to rise above such setbacks and, partly to remind myself that I still had the capacity to grow as a person, I abandoned the syphilis. I still wanted that meteorite—a very, very specific meteorite that affected no one else but the bastard who’d taken our car (and nearly our holiday), and I wanted it to leave a deep, person-sized crater smouldering where they had stood. Fairly unlikely, but we should always dare to dream. What unfurled on the phone felt only a little less cosmically strange. I lost all interest in Tasmania’s scenery as my caller filled me in on the backstory. He was in Sydney just a few suburbs from our house and visiting his niece. ‘Well, she’s really my daughter, but I call her my niece. Long story.’ Under normal circumstances, I would have asked for some fleshing out, but the momentum was rightly his and he ploughed on. He soon introduced the troubled fulcrum of the story—let’s call him Pedro—who played the father role to the daughter/niece and had (allegedly) driven over drunk a while back with the intention of (allegedly) giving the car to the daughter/niece as a present. Or teaching her to drive. I’m a little fuzzy on this. What wasn’t fuzzy was the near tectonic tension between Pedro and my caller. Indeed, my caller delivered a character assessment of such cool devastation it would have slotted in perfectly alongside the Julia Gillard/Kevin Rudd bits in The Killing Season. As it was, my caller said he’d only just arrived from interstate and was suspicious the moment he saw the car. ‘Did you hear that?’ he said between laughs to an interlocutor who, I assume, was the daughter/niece. ‘I told you it was stolen!’ When I told him it wasn’t just stolen but had been stolen long enough for the insurance to have been paid out and its successor bought and taken on subsequent adventures, he guffawed so hard I worried he might bring up a kidney. ‘What did I tell you?’ he gasped at the daughter/niece between paroxysms of schadenfreude. The immediate future was looking a little complicated for Pedro. Given how totally our car seemed to have vanished, I’d assumed it had been a slick, professional operation, our trusty and only briefly owned steed quietly rebirthed or dismembered for parts. I was disabused of this notion with speed and enjoyment. ‘Mate, it’s still got the original number plates on it.’ The guffaws had softened to giggles, and it was strangely infectious. ‘I rang the Roads and Traffic Authority and they said you were the last registered owner … I looked in the glove box and found the contract with the car dealer with your name and mobile number at the top. Anyway, the windscreen’s smashed, but apart from that it’s in top nick. You must miss it.’ After I talked with my insurance company, I texted my caller to thank him again for his detective work. ‘All good, mate,’ he replied. ‘The cops are on their way!’ I was happy about the outcome, but not, I suspect, as much as him. When the police finally rang, it seemed Pedro had been deprived of his liberty while he, ahem, assisted with inquiries. As for the damage to the windscreen, the friendly constable seemed sure it had been done from the inside by Pedro’s head after he drove the car into a pingpong table. I’d never imagined my lost car’s windscreen playing the role of syphilitic meteor, but I decided it would do. Of course, by the time I learnt about Pedro, I’d long since bought a replacement car. This, like its predecessor, was a Subaru Forester—the Volvo of my generation. It was shiny and lovely and, unusually for us, built this century. Daisy and Leo treated its arrival with great fanfare, eyeing its pristine, vacuumed expanses as an artist might a blank canvas. The first drive was accorded all the sense of occasion due a maiden voyage. It was remiss of me not to have lined the street with neighbours throwing streamers as we pulled away from the kerb. I wonder how much the kids will remember it. When I was growing up, the arrival of each new car in the family was an occasion. With the exception of a beige road-barge of a Fairlane, Dad indulged a soft spot for Kingswoods. My favourite was bronze with a white roof, which he bought from an old bloke who’d evidently done nothing in his waking hours but fuss over it. The whole thing sparkled. Even the vinyl seats had been buffed to a state of near frictionlessness, so my sister Olivia and I amused ourselves by quietly unbuckling our seatbelts whenever we approached a big bend, giggling as we slid and thudded into each other. We loved that vinyl. Except in summer when, like a trusted family dog that suddenly develops a hankering for human flesh, it would turn on us and fry our thighs. Dad, though, never drove with the same visceral pleasure that Mum did. In her third stab at wedded bliss, Mum discovered the benefits of being married to a mechanic. Not least, one whose hobby was buying cars on the cheap at auction, fixing them and selling them. A few of these made their way into Mum’s hands, and she celebrated the new arrivals with a fresh speeding ticket. ‘Bastards,’ she would mutter darkly as she arrived home, before brightening into her description of how her new ride went ‘like a rocket—a rocket!’ I suspect Mum’s driving single-handedly funded the construction of an entire wing of Sutherland police station. But the car that stands out the most from my childhood is the Kombi, the slowest and last one Mum and Dad owned together. A perky shade of red and with a sound like a lawnmower battalion, it was, Mum excitedly explained, our ticket to exploring Australia. Mum’s urge to do this exploration lasted precisely as long as our first tentative foray onto a dirt road in the Royal National Park, near where we lived. As the gravel rumbled beneath the tyres, her reaction showed the same level of enthusiasm as someone setting fire to the guest book. Decades later, the bulk of Australia remains as much of a mystery to her as it was to the first European settlers. The Kombi stayed, though. Us kids couldn’t get over the novelty of a car that had not only a pop-up roof but its own sink, a

back seat lined with a beach towel out of which we diligently plucked threads that we chewed into spitballs that stuck to the windows with satisfying tenacity, and a faint aroma—almost sweet, not quite pleasant—that we could never quite put our fingers on. It also had a starring role in what proved to be our last family holiday together, a spring visit to the Snowy Mountains. If you were looking for omens that gave a hint of what was to come, you could at a pinch select the scene in which my parents were packing the Kombi and noticed me in a parka zipped up to my chin and the hood pulled down to my eyes. It was November and it was warm, though nowhere near what it was inside that parka. Amusement turned to curiosity turned to action and they unzipped me from what by that point was essentially an oven with sleeves, only to discover my skin was a riot of chickenpox. ‘I was scared we wouldn’t go on holiday,’ I whimpered. They laughed, which struck me as not very parental. We set off via the pharmacy, then went roaring down the Hume Highway at a speed slightly greater than continental drift. I was alone in my misery of scratching only for the first couple of days, then Olivia’s skin blossomed as impressively as a field of poppies. That entire trip for me is a cloying fug of calamine lotion. That and the Kombi’s brakes failing one day as we lumbered downhill to have our first look at the Murray River. Mum’s explanation of how it was all Dad’s fault had an almost operatic quality (though the shouting and wedding-ring flinging that followed that night was more David Mamet). Having survived the initial excitement, and then the aftershocks of Mum’s rolling diatribes, we made it to a service station. My parents decided some sort of emotional compensation package was in order; I scored a Smurf, which I found most satisfactory. We left the mountains and, shortly after, spring gave way to the hot silences of the summer of 1980–81. A couple of months later, there was the Big Fight, the Siege, then the Departure. Mum was completely at ease with the idea of wealth redistribution and added the Kombi to everything else she took that day. It turned out the court didn’t take a relaxed attitude to DIY custody arrangements, and things took an unflinchingly official turn. Custody of the Kombi was done a little more informally. Or, in other words, with one of Dad’s mates who knew about hotwiring cars; he was a lawyer. The deed was done in the dead of night. Or at least what was the dead of night until they turned on that engine—no quiet getaways in a Kombi. It was sold quickly after that. If Mum wished a syphilis-coated meteorite on Dad, one thing’s for sure: even with the passage of time, she never would have dropped the syphilis. In that sense, mine is a mellower generation.

4 judgment daze DESPITE THE EXCITEMENT OF our impromptu move, we made it only as far as the next suburb, to a small unit overlooking a car dealership in Sutherland. I’d never lived in a flat before, and explored the modest space curiously. How were we meant to survive without a backyard? How was I going to play with my friends? Would I still go to the same school? What was the deal with being able to hear the neighbours through the ceiling? And was it the same for the neighbours beneath us? Little practicalities like these presented themselves in my brain, distracting me from the strange, dreamy freefall of everything else. Part of that freefall was János, the new man in Mum’s life. It was quite a novelty to see Mum in the company of a significant other and not seem grumpy about it. He had no children of his own and had just leapt from his own marriage into this readymade family—so God knows what it was like for him. He was a japester who would impart important lessons to us over the years. Among them: how to catch mullet without bait; how to catch sparrows with your bare hands; how to make sure you actually deserved the adoration of a dog. Thanks to him, the stool at Mum’s beloved piano was draped in a kangaroo hide in which the bullet hole was visible and proudly pointed out to us by János, who’d put it there. He took us out on Botany Bay fishing from his boat and visiting little beaches we didn’t know existed. He talked of one day taking us shooting feral pigs in the scrub near Lightning Ridge. Mum and János eventually got married at home—the celebrant sat on the kangaroo skin and played the piano—and they seemed happy for a while, Mum’s existence becoming more Hungarian than it could ever have been with Dad. Our lives would become filled with former Olympic fencers and opal miners, market farmers, men devoted almost religiously to the telling of coarse jokes, hilariously sardonic old women, and doughy women with sad eyes. And as time went on, it became increasingly clear that for János, stepchildren were an energy drain. When Mum finally pulled the pin on their marriage several years and a handful of addresses later, we never said goodbye to him. And yet, looking back beyond all that, I realise I have no memory of my first meeting with him in Sutherland that strange day; I can only imagine that as he considered our suddenly reconfigured living arrangements, he was as discombobulated as the rest of us. But I do remember looking around that flat. It turned out this was just a temporary staging post for a bigger odyssey. From here, Mum explained, we were to eventually go 1000 kilometres north to Brisbane, where her brother lived with his family. ‘What about Dad?’ I asked. ‘He can come visit you if he wants,’ Mum said in her most magnanimous tone. ‘I won’t stop him.’ Unfortunately for Mum, the law was in a contrary sort of mood and within days we were a few blocks across Sutherland in the Court of Petty Sessions. I stared at the sign and asked what was meant by ‘petty sessions’. When someone helpfully explained, I thought there must be some sort of mistake. How could my family’s apocalypse count as petty? Then a more troubling thought entered my mind: if this counted as petty, what horrendous stuff was being dealt with in the non-petty courts? It was my first inkling that the world was a rugged place. Olivia and I were spared seeing the sausage of custody arrangements being made, but things didn’t pan out for Mum. Sure, she’d shown ambition by imagining we’d be able quietly to disappear in the neighbouring suburb, but the magistrate gave her no brownie points. The next thing Olivia and I knew we were back with Dad, who looked a whole lot happier than the last time I’d seen him—it can’t have hurt that he wasn’t standing by the rockery. We stopped at a toy shop, where he was determined to start the process of making every thing right again. Both of us were allowed to pick one toy each, though Dad, keenly aware of the financial black hole that was at that very moment being pulled into shape by lawyers, sensibly set a budget. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t respect it. There was something I’d been coveting for a while: a spaceship from The Empire Strikes Back, which we’d seen at the cinema the year before. It wasn’t even one of the big-ticket spaceships, just a twin-pod police ship from Cloud City, where Han Solo ended up betrayed by his best friend, handed over to Darth Vader, tortured, frozen, then carted off by a bounty hunter. So the context was important. More pressingly, it was big and I knew that I wanted it—just as certainly as I knew that Dad was at his most emotionally vulnerable and was more likely to crack then than at any other moment. I pressed my case, making it clear that this expensive hunk of moulded plastic was guaranteed to ensure my happiness at this difficult time. I held it in the car all the way home, idly wondering what to aspire to next. I don’t think Olivia was quite so easily distracted. The first attempt at a custody arrangement was that we would stay with Mum every second weekend. I was nearly nine, but all I remember of the first time this was tried was the way it ended, when Mum was due to hand us back. It was a bit like an oldfashioned spy swap, with two hostile powers facing each other across a no-man’s land. It was a Sunday night in the middle of Sutherland, across the street from the police station. Olivia and I were meant to walk calmly the few dozen metres along the path to where Dad was waiting, but at the sight of him, Mum had a change of heart. Undeterred by her recent experiences with the law, she grabbed our hands and ran with us across the street and into the police station, where she proceeded to defame Dad with a creativity and energy you don’t often see at the fag end of a weekend. The custody arrangements had to be fine-tuned after that. These were the relatively carefree early days, of course. Eventually, inevitably, the whole catastrophe lumbered its way to the Family Court. The two important things to bear in mind before we proceed are (a) as brutal as it got, a lot of it would become funny with the benefit of the passage of time and hindsight; and (b) as brutal as it got, it was fundamentally guided by one deeply agreeable shared motive: Dad and Mum both wanted us. In that sense, a custody case that pans out that way can be perversely good for the ego. It’s just that in a twist of the usual equation, the road to good intentions was paved with hell. The old court was bombed the year after my parents’ case was wrapped up. No one was hurt, though things didn’t turn out so well for a number of judges and one of their wives, who were murdered in the early 1980s. No arrest was made until 2015. I recently went to have a look at the old court’s replacement, a blond slab of an edifice with a brutalist clock tower that looks like it was modelled on a vampire hunter’s stake. Once I’d gone through the metal detector, the first thing I noticed was a glassed-in courtyard—all white pebbles and gardenias and a tiered fountain burbling away. To my left hung lists of all the couples scheduled to be facing each other that day. To my right sat a bloke with a wheelie suitcase and a resigned expression. Paper signs meted out the news that change for photocopying was no longer available. A couple of small children pottered about with unfussed expressions on their faces; they looked younger than I did back then. And at least they had room to move, or at least more than we did back in the day. For an insight into just how bad the old place was, 1985’s Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works report recommending the construction of a new building is a solid starting point. As it outlines the case for abandoning the building in which the court resided, you can feel the report authors’ professional commitment to dry language slowly crumbling in the face of just what an emotional and physical shit pit it was. Here’s one snippet: ‘the waiting area outside the courtroom is often filled to standing room only. The overcrowding in the waiting area is likely to compound what, for some people, is a very stressful period. The disorderly flow of litigants and practitioners into and out of the courtroom, apart from being indecorous, is likely to lead to confusion, delays and exacerbate

emotional distress.’ And this little bit of bleak magic: ‘The only available room in the building for legal practitioners to consult with their clients is located on the third floor. When the room is in use, it is necessary for other private consultations to be conducted in public areas.’ At this point, the report dives to an almost subterranean level of understatement: ‘This would be difficult …’ As for the all-important counselling rooms, they were too few, too small and ‘noise transmission between rooms was cited as a constant problem facing counselling staff and occupants of adjacent rooms’. Then there was the overly modest number of lifts —just a pair servicing eight floors—and the lack of separate entrances leading to the possibility of ‘parties sharing a lift with the judge who is hearing their case’. Mercifully for all concerned, this never happened with Mum, who might have had a few ripe things to say. But she wasn’t idling. With the tide running ever harder against her, she decided to escalate. If my kids even give a hint that they’re going to whinge about their homework, I hit them with the story about the dodgiest assignment I was ever given. During one of Mum’s brief access sessions with us, she revealed a plan she’d hatched with (or at least at) her solicitor. As I would learn much later from Dad during one of his bleaker fits of nostalgia, Mum had picked her solicitor without a whole lot in the way of due diligence. He specialised in conveyancing and was ill-suited to the theatre of poison that was the Family Court. Symmetrically, he was also unprepared for the baroque realm of emotion in which Mum preferred to operate. But he did try. The scenario was simple. I was to be enlisted in a plan to prove Dad was a father of such startling incompetence that the court would immediately see the folly of its ways and, obeying nature’s firmest law, hand us back to our mother. Of course, the plan involved food. With Mum, the stomach was the truest prism through which to view the world. Hungry? Eat. Sick? Eat. Tired? Eat. Worried? You’re not eating enough. Not hungry? Eat—because who knows when you’ll eat again! My mission was set out like homework. Every night I would write a secret report about what Dad had cooked, then, after a couple of weeks, hand it in. Unfortunately, I treated it like homework and left it until the last minute. What simplified it was that we’d guilted Dad into feeding us our favourite dish every second night: pasta with poppy seeds and sugar. Mum had introduced us to this and we were as addicted as you’d expect with something essentially related to heroin. Olivia and I were picky little buggers, and Dad—already stressed on multiple levels—was grateful we were eating at all. So I’d bash out all the alternate entries in my collaborator’s dining diary, then either remember or make up dinners for other nights. Then I’d hand in my homework, which Mum inspected with grim pleasure before delivering it to her solicitor. Mum did some of her growing-up under a Hungarian dictator who billed himself as ‘Stalin’s most loyal disciple’. I could never figure out if it was because of this or despite this that she had no problem with encouraging us to turn our own father in to the authorities. ‘They are not getting proper nutrition!’ she wailed in court. What was amusing was that she basically shortened our life span every afternoon she had custody by filling us with her version of cukros túró—basically, a fifty-fifty mix of cottage cheese and sour cream with a sack of sugar stirred in. Once I mentioned something a friend had told me about what a dentist had told them about sugar and teeth. ‘Dentists?’ Mum cried. ‘What do they know? They just want your money.’ Then she added extra sugar. It was delicious. Armed with our ton of sweetened artery cement we’d plonk ourselves on the sofa and gorge our way through Simon Townsend’s Wonder World. By the end, we’d feel even more leaden than Townsend’s bloodhound, Woodrow, whose face looked like it had developed in gravitational conditions far more severe than Earth’s. Anyway, my homework eventually surfaced in court and I learnt about the word ‘affidavit’. When Dad came to talk to me about it, he wore an expression I’d never seen before—unhappiness overlaid with a mask of, well, determined non-unhappiness. I would get some inkling later in life just how angry he’d been, but not with me. The war dragged on, but I was never asked to keep a dinner diary again. Amazingly, Dad never asked us to give up poppy seeds, either. Years later, when I finally overtook him in height, Dad gave me a wink. ‘Must have been my cooking.’ In a pleasing twist, the building that housed the old Family Court is now home to both a cafe and a restaurant. The Family Court did, in its own way, try to simplify things. There was the friendly man (I remember a moustache and a brown suit, though I could be wrong about both) who did his best to make everything sound routine and most definitely not threatening or life-changing. ‘Of course you love your parents equally, and they love you. But …’ There are no buts quite like a Family Court but. ‘But if you had to choose, who would you prefer to live with?’ Mum and Dad had both known this would be coming, and had handled it in their own ways. They knew they weren’t meant to coach us, which was a magnificently optimistic directive from the court. Mum disobeyed it with particular energy, carrying on with the confidence of someone convinced that everything had until that point been an inexplicable aberration and that the natural order would soon be restored. It wasn’t so clear-cut for Olivia, but I knew. By then, with their Brisbane ambitions quashed, Mum and János had moved across town to Miller, a suburb near Liverpool. At the end of their street, suburbia gave way to paddocks where I loved roaming with my first camera, photographing the horses. But I wanted the house I’d grown up in, the cul-de-sac full of my friends, my school, the bushland behind our street, the local Police Boys Club where I’d started learning bagpipes, the somewhat lower likelihood of melodrama. ‘Yes, I love them both the same,’ I said. ‘But I’d rather live with Dad.’ As I said it, I began picturing myself trying to explain this one to Mum. I hoped that before that I might get abducted and taken to live on a space station. Disappointingly, this didn’t happen. And because I wasn’t in space, I could most definitely hear the screaming. Once again I knew the gut churn of betrayal, and I couldn’t get rid of it. Both my parents loved Olivia and me and had been fighting for us like they’d been fighting for breath; this is something I understood more and more as time went on. My feelings about some of the excesses experienced during the custody battle eventually softened into something—well, if not a close relative of understanding, perhaps a second cousin. But I’d been handed a choice and I didn’t want to leave things to chance. The divorce and the custody arrangements were finalised in 1983, the year I turned eleven and Olivia eight. The Big Fight was now more than two years behind us and, surprising nothing but the statistics—which most definitely did not favour fathers —we stayed with Dad. Return of the Jedi came out that year; I got a new spaceship.

5 mouths of babes IRISH COMEDIAN DYLAN MORAN argues that toddlers are a lot like drunks: unsteady on their feet, emotionally unstable, easily belligerent, able to vomit at the drop of a hat, and prone to collapsing in a puddle of tears and/or urine. It’s not a perfect analogy; if you hand a toddler a karaoke microphone, they’re probably not going to butcher Cold Chisel and collapse on you with a slurred ‘I love you, maaaate’, but Moran is essentially right. Parenting books prepare you for all this. For the adult on the cusp of being thrown into early childhood’s sticky embrace, the ground is laid: the ups and downs; the horrors of nappies; the bittersweetness of separation anxiety; the eye-opening wonder of projectile vomiting; colic. This is all valuable, and not just because it hammers home the importance of filling your house with wipeable surfaces. But perhaps there’s an agreement among the authors of such books to avoid stripping life of all its surprises. For starters, one thing they don’t warn you about is that having small children is essentially a practice run for living in a police state. Little kids are compulsive snitches. Once they get past Moran’s miniature-drunk phase they metamorphose, like messy little caterpillars that emerge from their cocoons, into Stasi butterflies. I can’t think of how many times I’ve been in a home when someone’s sprog has blurted out an indiscretion of awe-inspiring magnitude, drawing from their parents the universal pained smile that precedes the words ‘No secrets in our house’. It starts out as an inability to keep anything they’ve learnt to themselves, a sort of information incontinence that can be regarded as the forerunner to Twitter. My son, Leo, was almost eerily talented in this department when he was still small enough for me to carry on one arm without risking shoulder dislocation. The lead-up to Mother’s Day would be one prime time. I’d take Leo and Daisy into a conspiratorial huddle inside their bedroom and show them what Mummy was getting. ‘Now remember,’ I’d say, ‘it’s a surprise.’ Leo and Daisy would nod. ‘Which means it’s a secret.’ More nodding. ‘Which means not telling Mummy.’ Very enthusiastic nodding. ‘Because it’s nice to get surprises.’ Nod nod nod. We’d carefully wrap the present, whispering the whole time, then, when it was done, admire our handiwork. And then Daisy would notice Leo had quietly left us, his footsteps creaking ominously down the hallway. ‘Guess what, Mummy?’ he’d call in a voice that managed to be at once singsong and very loud. He’d then give a detailed description of the present, then add: ‘But I can’t tell you because it’s a secret!’ Teachers are recipients of some startling nuggets of unsolicited information. I know some who have learnt from their charges that, for example, Daddy likes to try on Mummy’s clothes. Or that Mummy cries a lot next to empty bottles because the bottles make her sad. Or that Daddy’s friends like coming over very late at night with cars they found so that they can repaint them in the shed and put new number-plates on. But just as Jurassic World gave us a dinosaur that kills not just out of necessity but for sport, kids move on to dobbing for fun. Indeed, Daisy and Leo have taken to reporting on each other’s misdemeanours with gusto. Unnervingly, they pay attention to detail in a way that brings back memories of studying a pile of KGB reports in the museum made out of the apartment in which Andrei Sakharov spent his exile, each yellowed sheet of paper a masterpiece of malevolently forensic banality. Other times it’s a bit more like Minority Report, with Daisy or Leo getting pinged for a misdemeanour yet to be actually committed. For a while, though, the greatest glee was reserved for when Bel or I had been pulled over by the police while the kids were in the back seat. If I got home to be greeted by Daisy and Leo thundering to the door with huge grins and a ‘Guess what?’, I knew what was coming. And after I had an unscheduled chat with the constabulary once, Leo almost floated into the house afterwards, radiating the sense of satisfaction I imagine lottery officials give off when they pick up the phone to ring a new winner. Nothing stands still, though. The kids are no longer waiting at the door for me. As of a couple of weeks ago, they both have mobile phones, so they just ring instead.

PART II

caution: ghost sex ahead

6 of mice and sharks DOGS WERE THE ANIMALS that taught me about unconditional love, and snakes taught me the beauty of silence. But it was mice that gave me my first lesson in family planning. I was eight and Mum and Dad’s marriage was still just about intact when I got them. They were the first pets that were genuinely my own, not something I was obliged to pretend I shared with the rest of the family. I went to the pet shop dreaming of albinos with bright pink eyes, but instead fell for a beige-coloured female and a black male. I’m ashamed to say I don’t remember their names; perhaps it’s because of what happened later. What I do remember is the excitement as Mum drove me and Olivia home from the pet shop. The mice were duly installed in their new home, which was one of those little glass-fronted wooden cages with upstairs sleeping quarters and a squeaking treadmill of translucent purple plastic. With some parental help, I set up their water bottle, spread sawdust across the bottom of the cage and laid a pink-grey mouse ‘mattress’ in their bedroom. I have no idea what the mattress was made of—it may have been fashioned from asbestos, for all I know—but the mice had a jolly time biting it, ripping it and creating a bed that looked like it was part cloud, part garbage dump. A perfect habitat in which a pair of mice might raise a family. To say I was enchanted would be an understatement of some magnitude. Even at night when Dad had sent me back to bed with a third and very final warning, I’d lie awake listening to the squeaking of the treadmill. Come daylight, I was riveted to that cage, watching Beige and Black as they scurried up and down the ramp from their boudoir, sipped at their water bottle, gnawed mouse pellets and, to be frank, mated like maniacs. I wasn’t an animal-sex connoisseur of any note, but their couplings always struck me as frantic, as though a comet was about to hit the earth and they were trying to squeeze in a final quickie before the obliteration of all life. But what they lacked in quality (or at least as I imagined it), they more than made up for in quantity. And somehow, they found strength afterwards for a run on the treadmill. Then it was back to making the mouse with two backs. I still wonder what was in those pellets. Not surprisingly, Beige soon began to swell, almost as swiftly as if she’d backed into a bicycle pump. I raced home from school every afternoon, convinced I was going to be a ‘grandfather’ at last. But each time, the nest was empty and so was Beige. What had happened? Mum shrugged her shoulders when I told her. Within weeks, Beige was expanding again into a furry Hindenburg. And again there was the same result. It kept happening and the sense of mystery was every bit as deep as my despondency. Perhaps if I’d been paying more attention, I might have noticed how attached the family cat had become to Mum. After all, Mum was someone of whom animals tended to be instinctively wary. Whereas Dad’s family had been a dynasty of animal lovers who’d looked fondly upon furred and feathered alike, Mum’s was divided into two schools. Exemplifying the first was my grandfather, who had been besotted with pretty much everything that breathed. He was even known to come home from a pleasant morning at his vineyard and, aided by the fruits of his labours, doze off in the sun with his pet grass snake coiled contentedly on his belly. In the other camp was my grandmother, who never really seemed to grasp the concept of keeping animals unless they could (a) be eaten, or (b) produce something that could be eaten. Once she intercepted me as I arrived home triumphant from the local aquarium shop, a South American oscar as long as my hand peering out from the bag of water. Imagining she’d be impressed, I held the bag aloft so she could inspect its orange scales and comical, goggle eyes. Instead, a few new wrinkles spread across her forehead. ‘Why spend your pocket money on such a fish? It’s not even worth throwing in a pan.’ When these two schools of thought collided, it wasn’t pretty, as my grandfather learnt when his snake went for a wander, only to encounter the end of my grandmother’s broomstick. Mum—who often used to look her most contented when she was down in the chook pen and wringing a feathered neck while visualising one of her ex-husbands—was most definitely her mother’s daughter. Years later, she finally sat me down and confessed. She’d been terrified we were going to be submerged in an Old Testament–proportioned flood of beige and black mice, and so had gone down the road of the pre-emptive strike, swiftly but quietly scooping each wriggling, pink litter of newborns into a bowl and summoning the cat. At the time, of course, I didn’t know. The strange spell was broken only when we went on holiday for a week. When we got home, I beat Mum to the cage. Seconds later, I was hurtling through the house, crying out, ‘They’ve had babies!’ Mum would go on to have the last laugh over the mice when moving day arrived, but for now things were sweet. Beige and Black would prove to be exemplary parents. If I could pop back in time to that moment, I’d like to find out their names. But first, I’d want to see the look on Mum’s face. Dad was far more Zen and put up with all sorts of things during my animal-crazed youth. He’d go to have a wash and discover, for example, that I’d appropriated the shower as a temporary frog enclosure. The freezer, once a safe haven of peas and ice cream, filled with bags of rodents. Then there was the time he opened a drawer and found two baby pythons coiled among the socks, tongues flickering. ‘Jim,’ he called mildly, ‘were you missing anyone?’ But nothing demonstrated his tolerance like the time he helped me lug home a shark called Bruce. We’d been at my favourite rock pools, where I’d planned to harvest inhabitants for my new saltwater aquarium. My ambitions were modest. Following an earlier mistake when I’d grandly installed an octopus only for it to turn the precious saltwater black the first time I switched on the light, I was keeping it simple: some crabs, a couple of sea anemones and starfish, a few minnows. All that changed the moment I saw Bruce. Nearly as long and cylindrical as a dachshund, he lay on the bottom of a small rock pool, every bit as exciting and unexpected as if I’d found an albatross in a birdbath. He wasn’t the only surprise—there was a big, pale pufferfish looking a bit the worse for wear. I scooped it up in my net, where it inflated to the size of a rockmelon, and liberated it into the sea. No such luck came Bruce’s way. The name was bestowed quickly, a laconic suggestion from Dad, who’d wandered over from his one-way conversation with the seagulls to see what on earth it was I was wrestling out of my net into the esky. ‘I think your net’s met its end,’ Dad said, noting how the writhing Bruce had torn it. ‘Or as the French would say, fin.’ Evidently pleased with this pun, he helped me carry the sloshing esky to the car for the ride home. Years later, I would discover Bruce was also the name Steven Spielberg had bestowed on his mechanical great white while making Jaws. Bruce’s transfer into his new home was only slightly less dramatic than that movie. ‘Why is there water on the ceiling?’ Dad inquired. But after the initial chaos, peace. Boy and shark stared at each other through the glass. Given he packed what looked like a perfectly functioning pair of eyes, I was surprised to discover that Bruce was a so-called blind shark. It turned out the name came unhelpfully from their ability to pull their eyeballs in when they’re lifted out of the water. To be honest, I hadn’t noticed this during the drama of the capture.

A bottom-dweller like the Port Jackson shark and the splendidly named wobbegong, Bruce spent his days in stately inertia on the aquarium sand. But then there were the nights. I discovered the joys of sharing a room with a boisterously nocturnal animal, thumping and thudding in the darkness, the filters copping as much of a pounding as my sleep did. I opened the blinds a little to let the streetlight fill the tank like moonlight, and watched transfixed as Bruce transformed from a doorstop with gills to a restless, rampant wraith. I’d eventually drift off, waking to fresh puddles on the floor. Bits of prawn and fish would vanish, as would the small battalions of crabs I’d release into the tank with only the faintest twinge of guilt. The odd crustacean leg, lonely on the aquarium sand, would be the only hint of the carnage the night before. But Bruce would lie still—gills pulsing rhythmically, tiny eyes glittering—quietly building up to the next round of nocturnal commotion. It went like this for a couple of months. I was getting bleary-eyed. As I looked at big Bruce in the confines of his tank, I slowly began to admit to myself it wasn’t right. As much as I loved having him (and, to be frank, the small-scale notoriety that came with keeping him), I knew it was time to pack the esky again. Standing in the knee-deep water while Dad hummed a suitably dramatic soundtrack from the rocks, I lowered the esky and gently tipped it forward. The shark I’d briefly got to call mine overcame his daytime inertia, erupted like a brown torpedo and vanished into the shadows. ‘May as well try a crocodile next,’ Dad said as we drove home.

7 lest we beget OUR FIRST CHILD CAME as such a surprise to me and Bel, you’d think we’d never read Where Did I Come From? And yet there we sat in a Dublin doctor’s surgery during her lunch break one crisp February day, confirming what had been learnt in the bathroom early that morning. ‘I’d say I’m about four weeks pregnant,’ Bel ventured. The doctor’s eyebrows lifted like the wings of an albatross about to take flight. ‘I think you’ll find you’re a little bit further gone than that.’ Thanks to Bel’s diabetes knocking around one of the great regularities of the female body, we’d missed the early signs. Waves of nausea were blamed on a salmon roll, and a sudden aversion to alcohol was hailed as early-onset sensibility. Even Bel’s suggestion she was feeling a little stout around the middle was dismissed by me with a ‘Pfft’. Our friends responded by quietly laying bets that Bel was up the duff. It must be said our life together did not lack for upheaval in those days. We were in the process of packing up our lives in Dublin to head to Moscow, where I had landed a (possibly ill-advised) job at a newspaper. I was already giddy over that, having hankered for Russia with something approaching homesickness since I’d left it seven years earlier. And then, as I met Bel for lunch that day without even the slightest inkling as to why she was grabbing my hand with such urgency, came the announcement that knocked the Moscow development into a small fur hat. We’d never planned to have children, figuring a pack of dogs would be a more than adequate substitute. But suddenly it was happening and nothing could have prepared us for this supernova of happiness. Anyone at the southern end of St Stephen’s Green would have seen two lunatics skipping and running past in a blur of glee. I’ve never felt that way en route to a doctor’s surgery before. Not that everyone reacted that way, of course. ‘There, there, dear,’ the doctor murmured as tears began coursing down Bel’s cheeks. ‘No, no—I’m happy,’ said Bel. The first time I saw happy tears as a child was when someone won the lot on Sale of the Century. The second time was when Dad was watching The Two Ronnies. This was far more amazing than either, which is saying something. ‘Are you sure?’ asked the doctor. ‘I’ve given the same news to two other couples today, and they didn’t take it at all well.’ The days, which had already been passing in a strange blur, now became a kaleidoscope of joyful madness. It was like we’d been waiting at a bus stop when, rather unexpectedly, a wormhole opened up and every bus that had ever existed in the entirety of automotive history suddenly turned up. (A different sort of wormhole opened up when my mate Ciaran and I were involved in a near-death experience involving a production line of margaritas at the Shelbourne Hotel to celebrate my impending fatherhood. But I digress.) We first clapped eyes on our baby a few days later as the shifting puzzle of ultrasound shadows coalesced into human form. The doctor had been right. Bel was more than four weeks gone: this kid looked ready to pop out and enrol in high school. A short time later, I was in a taxi on my way to the Russian embassy (amusingly located on Orwell Road) to pick up our passports. ‘Your first?’ the driver asked as he pulled away from the National Maternity Hospital with well-practised ease. ‘Yes,’ I said, my heart bouncing all over the place. ‘Ah, that’s grand. I have eleven myself.’ It took about ten minutes of research into the maternity wards of Moscow for us to decide that Bel would be returning to Sydney for the birth. There were just too many stories about mothers and babies going home with interesting infections, and of fathers being kept from meeting their new children, even having to bribe hospital security so they could sneak in and a catch a glimpse as their wife came out onto the balcony high above and held their daughter/son aloft. (Some friends went through this the following year, confirming it wasn’t just a rumour beaten into credibility on the internet.) And then there were the potential complications arising from Bel’s diabetes and, well, we had the makings of a pretty straightforward trip to the travel agent. But let it be said that Moscow is a great city in which to be pregnant. The Russians are already predisposed to being dotty about babies, but with their country’s population slowly but surely imploding, nothing opens doors there quite as sweetly as a bun in the oven. And so it was for Bel. As winter brightened into the brief, delicate spring that flits through Moscow ahead of the flattening, gritty heat of summer, Bel got around in a fetching pair of maternity overalls a woman in my office had adoringly lent her. If there was a queue, she would be passed down it. If she went to catch a train, people would almost give themselves whiplash surrendering a seat—though, sometimes, it was a bit secondary. By which I mean sturdy old women brutally elbowing out their neighbour then, indicating the now-empty seat, smiling sweetly and telling her, ‘Young woman, sit!’ When the time came to fly home she was very conspicuously pregnant, the bump parked resolutely out the front like a medicine ball. I was to follow six weeks later, but it suddenly struck me as a distressingly long time to be apart. At the airport, she joined a queue on the other side of a glass barrier and I stupidly thought we had a while to blow kisses at each other and mouth sweet nothings and everythings. But the Russians took one look at her and her medicine ball and, with their dour faces splitting into huge smiles, passed her down the line. Within moments, she was gone. As I schlepped back out, I looked up at the low ceiling decorated with what looked like a long copper pipe cut into a million pieces. It had bewitched me a decade earlier when I arrived in Moscow for the first time. I’d missed the Soviet Union’s official demise by eighteen days, but the signs of that fallen empire were all around me. And yet, as I slowly milled towards the exit, past uniforms and hammers and sickles to where the snow lay blue in the slowly congealing dawn light, it was for some reason that ceiling that made the first impression on me. As I came and went from Moscow over the years, I started to develop an odd affection for it, even though I always imagined some small Russian town had had to forgo its hot-water supply for a year for the sake of its creation. When I returned to the airport weeks later, I joined the queue; unlike Bel, I was allowed to enjoy every minute of it. Beyond security and the magnificently stony-faced denizens of the passport booths, the role of the light at the end of the tunnel was played by a small Irish bar incongruously occupying a corner. I hopped onto a stool, feeling chipper but nervous about life, and ordered a very large stout. ‘I see you like Guinness too,’ murmured one of my neighbours, lifting his glass. ‘To your health.’ I returned the toast, took a swig and looked him in the eye. ‘I have to tell you: I’m going to be a father.’ He lowered his glass onto the bar, rose from his stool and solemnly shook my hand. ‘I wish you, your wife and your little one all health and happiness.’ Then he sat, and we knocked glasses again. Hours later as the plane lifted off, I looked out over the river snaking towards that immense city and the thought ballooned in my mind again: ‘When I come back, I’ll be a father.’ The drinks trolley made an appearance, but I let it squeak past and stared out the window, imagining.

Birth? I knew all about birth. Every year as my birthday rolls around, Mum rings … Well, except for the year she didn’t. But then I forgot hers one year, too, so they surely cancel each other out and there is no need for any hard feelings whatsoever. Right, Mum? That small blip aside, Mum rings every year. It’s a standard call with two distinct forms: one that has a pleasant preamble (‘Happy birthday, my son!’) before plunging into the rugged details of my arrival, and one that doesn’t. I was born in England a couple of months after Mum had arrived from Hungary with my brother and big sister to join Dad. The setting was a Lancashire hospital—in Orrell, to be precise (and yes, I am juvenile enough still to get a kick out of the name), just up the road from Wigan, the town George Orwell dragged into unhappy fame. In an uncharacteristic hurry to beat a deadline, I popped out six weeks earlier than I was meant to, and then the real adventure began. I don’t even have to shut my eyes for Mum’s voice to unspool into my head. ‘You were not breathing, Jimmykém.’ She always slips into the Hungarified diminutive of my name—Jimmykém translates as ‘my little Jimmy’. After I grew old enough to become self-conscious about it, it used to irritate me deeply. But as with so many fashions, this proved circular and I eventually grew appreciative again. ‘Do you understand, Jimmykém? Not a breath, oh my God.’ And then without fail it arrives in all its terrible splendour, an invocation of the medical equivalent of the Pantone chart. ‘You were turning every colour. Every colour! My sweet Lord!’ I hear about how I was slapped into breathing, and the tide of panic that rose in the delivery room as my small, glistening form went charging through every hue in the visible spectrum like a shortcircuiting chameleon. Mind you, Mum nearly blows a head gasket in sheer panic if you so much as sniffle, slamming shut every door and window for fear you’ll be carried deep into the realm of awful—quite possibly terminal—malady if you encounter so much as a slight draught. So I can get only an inkling of what it must have been like in there that day. Obviously, I drew breath before it was too late, and every year Mum performs her impersonation of it. It’s quite a production, and I’d be a lot more relaxed about the strain on her lungs if she weren’t such a chronic smoker. I was popped into a humidicrib (‘It looked like an aquarium!’) in a room with all the other new arrivals who’d mistimed their entry into the world. It sounds as though it was pretty grim. Mum brought a solid flare for melodrama to many things, but Dad did not (‘Not really an engineer’s sort of pastime’). Both of them told me the babies on either side of me died. I sometimes wonder about them. Had they lived, who would they be? What would they have become? How would their lives compare with mine, with each other’s? Are their parents still alive? Did they ever recover? Did they always carry them around as memories, or as empty spaces into which they poured their imaginations, their regrets, their unending chains of ‘What if’? Did they grow sad each year as those empty birthdays came and went? Or did they just grieve, then get on with the job of living? When Mum’s on her natal roll, though, there’s mercifully little time to get stuck on this because this is where the narrative transforms from horror story to epic, the tale of One Woman Against the System. Hungary versus England. ‘They would not let me feed you, but I told them a mother has to feed her child. Has. To. Feed. Her. Child. I told them, a baby must have its mother’s breast!’ By this point each year, her tone is defiant and intensifying with every sentence as she impresses upon me the sheer resoluteness with which she wore down those know-nothing bastards. ‘At last, they gave up. You took my breast, Jimmykém, and do you know what happened?’ I do, because she tells me every single year (except of course that one year, but I really don’t want to sound like I’m dwelling on that). ‘Your colour came rushing into your cheeks. Your proper colour, I mean, not all the blue and green and yellow I was telling you about before.’ And in conclusion: ‘A mother’s place is with her child. A mother knows best. I showed those idiots.’ Dad was never so florid when he talked about the fortnight when I was a bit touch and go, but there was no missing the tone in his voice: ‘Every time I went in, I watched you from the other side of the glass with my heart in my boots.’ I see photos of him holding me the day I came home from hospital—he looks like he’s just been high-fived by God. So yes, I have a quiet chuckle at Mum’s annual routine. But I never shake off the sense that I was bloody lucky. In 2006, I went with Mum and Laszlo and aunt Joli to have a look at the hospital. It was part of a few days in Lancashire, visiting old haunts from that handful of years before we moved to Australia. The hospital had been decommissioned and was patrolled by a small squadron of laconic guards and their dogs. We had a quick glance around the place, but no special feeling came over me. But it wasn’t a fruitless visit. One of the guards addressed me and Laszlo as ‘loov’, and Mum and Joli, who’d been hydrating themselves with great diligence as we went about our adventures, ducked off into the bushes for a pee. Daisy was born late at night that August in a Sydney hospital after a labour-and-caesarean marathon during which Bel proved once and for all that she was capable of physical endurance in a way I never would be. (The only way to level the playing field in this regard even a little bit would be for fathers to have some sort of constriction device attached to their bollocks, one programmed to work in tandem with the contractions. Or something along those lines. But there was none of that. Instead, we had a family friend who joined the posse in the waiting room. When I went out to deliver updates, she’d open her bag and extract a wine bottle in a brown-paper bag that, far from providing any disguise, may as well have grabbed a microphone and shouted into the hospital’s public address system, ‘I AM BOOZE!’ Not that she was deterred and instead inquired in one of the louder stage whispers I’ve encountered, ‘Would anybody like some … Ribena?’ To this day, Bel enjoys telling people about how while she was enduring a carnival of agony, I’d come back in with wine on my breath. At the time, I thought, ‘Well, you would if you could’, but I think I see her point now.) The theatre was like an old Doctor Who set and lit by a fierce white light beneath which a scalpel carefully but nimbly danced, and yea verily, Bel was open for business. All these years later, if someone asks me to name favourite moments in my life, Daisy will roll her eyes and chime in, ‘When he got married and when we were born’. This is both snotty and accurate, and I give her extra points if she chucks in something Star Wars–related for the triple. But frankly, it’s hard to top that first glimpse of a new human being—in this case, one who is the living embodiment of the love between Bel and me. And the whole business of creating an entire person inside another is one of those regular occurrences that still blows my mind. (That aeroplanes can get off the ground is another, but let’s not meander.) So up Daisy came. First her head, which in that moment was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. The sentiment wasn’t shared by her, judging by the expression on her face, which was the one anyone would be well within their rights to wear if rudely evicted from their snug, warm lodgings by a bunch of strangers in masks. Honestly, I’m amazed she didn’t screech any louder than she did. And then up came the rest of her. (It’s probably for the best I didn’t video it, or my son Leo would by now have asked me to play it backwards.) Fully emerged into the world, Daisy’s first act was to part her legs and pee on the doctor, confirming in quick succession that she was a girl, and that she was our girl. For a moment, I could also see a lot more of Bel than I ever thought I would. For better or worse, she was protected from seeing inside herself by a little green curtain just south of her chin. In the coming days, I would get my photos developed, sit on a bench near the photo lab and yank the snaps from their paper envelope. (I try to explain this scenario to the kids now and it all sounds so weirdly laborious to them, like trying to drag yourself up a mountain using nothing but your lips when you could just get a helicopter.) My favourite was one of Daisy, bright and gleaming in the light and ringed by an aura of disembodied hands. I thought it a work of art and had it scanned so I could email it to everyone. The sheer heft of the file meant that on the computers of the time—way, way back in the mists of 2002—it downloaded line by line like someone opening venetian blinds individually. I was sure everyone would appreciate the beauty of the photo and deem the effort worthwhile. One of my colleagues emailed back from Moscow: ‘It looks like a scene from Alien.’ Leo followed three-and-a-bit years later, emerging into the world around morning-tea time with a thatch of blond hair and an impressive squawk. ‘He’s a boy,’ I whispered to Bel, who’d once again climbed the Himalayas of agony. I regret to say I added, ‘He’s got a really

big schlong’. Due to Bel’s diabetes, Leo was soon dispatched to the ward where they kept the premature babies so they could monitor his blood-sugar levels as he adjusted to life outside his mum. While Bel’s mark of Caesar was sewn together I gave Leo his first feed, which was droll given how much strife I’d got into at the breast-feeding class I’d gone to with Bel. I made the mistake of asking two questions about bottle-feeding and … well. One was tolerated, but the second was taken as a provocation. ‘Why are you so obsessed?’ the teacher demanded. (I didn’t think two questions constituted an obsession, but then Germany started only two world wars and look how they got tainted.) ‘Do you expect your wife to spend time expressing milk just so you can have the pleasure of feeding your baby?’ She sounded like she was reading from a charge sheet and wasn’t entertaining any thoughts about recommending clemency. I thought about her as Leo, warm and surprisingly strong in my arms, latched on to that rubber teat and got slurping. Bel’s mother, Sue, arrived at the hospital with Daisy, who at that point sported one of the more brutally lopsided fringes in our family’s extremely varied hairdressing history. I still enjoy pulling out the photo of Daisy and Leo that day, partly for the joy of seeing sister and brother meeting for the first time, partly for the marvel of that fringe. Part avant-garde, part brutalist, it never gets old. The fringe’s architect arrived separately, and she came to inspect Leo in the special ward. Having drunk him in greedily with her eyes, Mum cast a critical gaze over all the premature babies around him, some of them barely bigger than kittens. ‘Look at our boy,’ she said, grandmaternal pride swelling fiercely. ‘Look at the meat on him! Not like these other ones.’ ‘Mum, they’re premature,’ I said, noting that one of the babies had been named after Anakin Skywalker, the Star Wars character doomed to succumb to the Dark Side, lose his identity, turn evil, kill his wife, get dismembered by his mentor, be incinerated on the bank of a lava river, and spend the rest of his days in a noisy life-support suit, estranged from his children and working for an arsehole. To each their own. ‘They were born early, like I was. Some of them a lot earlier.’ Mum was undeterred. ‘Such meat. Such a boy.’ Unlike Daisy, though, Leo wasn’t carted off three weeks later to live in Russia. I sometimes ponder what he missed out on.

8 onion dome dreaming CHARLES DICKENS DIDN’T HAVE Moscow in mind when he wrote about the best of times and the worst of times, but it would have been a decent fit. Russia’s capital lures and pushes away, enchants and repels, wraps you in beauty and beats you with ugliness. No city I’ve known is so good at lifting your soul to the maddest, giddiest heights, and grinding your face in the dirt. I was thinking about this again after the murder of Boris Nemtsov, a political figure who loomed large during my years of coming and going in Russia. So much was there in one picture: the fantastical domes of St Basil’s Cathedral; the sinister beauty of the Kremlin walls; the police, standing around and laughing; and Nemtsov’s body, alone on a bridge, bagged like garbage. Moscow took hold of my imagination in my late teens and I soon became something of a commuter, first arriving in the crisp depths of winter on the eighteenth day of post-Soviet Russia. It was a very different place from what it would soon become, flooded by neon and cash, but I was hooked. Amid that severity and bleakness was a stubborn, sometimes delicate beauty. And despite everything, life roared with an intensity that was new to me. Moscow is a cocktail of opposites. It’s deeply human, but can make humans feel like donor organs in a hostile body mustering all the antibodies at its disposal. St Petersburgers—never forgetful of their city’s lost status as an imperial capital— deride it as a giant village, yet it is dwarfingly monumental in a way St Petersburg never will be, its apocalyptic skyline seething with domes and towering edifices, the vampiric silhouettes of Stalin’s so-called Seven Sisters looming over the steppe-like expanses of boulevards. It’s the only city in which Mikhail Bulgakov could have had Satan and his entourage wandering with such ease. But the smaller, human moments are myriad. I close my eyes and think back to climbing apple trees with friends during nocturnal booze hunts, munching the sour fruit and singing drunkenly into the hot, dusty night. Riding trolley buses and rubbing ‘portholes’ in the icy windows to see where I was. Riding on escalators so long it was worth taking a book, descending into the subterranean wonderland of the Metro. Swimming in the river, watching in admiration as a local passed with a cigarette between his lips, puffing like a steamboat as he went. Endless processions of tiny shot glasses filled with vodka, with piles of dark bread to douse the blaze. Hearing the clatter of hoofs in an inner-city lane late one night and standing aside as a horse pounded past, a young woman in the saddle, reins in one hand and beer in the other. Long conversations that meandered towards dawn. But then there were the omnipresent uniforms: army conscripts, peach fuzz on their cheeks and huge guns in their hands, and police conducting passport checks in the street. I was lucky to be pale and blond; there was nothing like a hint of Chechen swarthiness to draw the cops. There was an unshakable sense that life wasn’t quite as precious. One night with friends, we found a man sleeping off a bender in the snow. We struggled to drag him towards the stairwell of a nearby apartment block so he wouldn’t freeze to death. Noticing a policeman watching us impassively, we asked if he would help. ‘For what?’ he grunted, then turned his back. Years later, when I was living there with Bel and the freshly born Daisy, a siege unfolded in a theatre across town. The authorities responded bluntly, flooding the theatre with gas, then stacking the unconscious living hostages and the dead alike on the cold footpaths outside like sacks of potatoes, killing many in the process. But the relatives who cried in anguish at the authorities may as well have been howling into the void. Moscow, as they’re fond of saying, doesn’t believe in tears. And then, suddenly, Nemtsov was gone, another name added to Russia’s dark list. My first thoughts were of revulsion, that Moscow had taken one step deeper into the abyss. But then the Muscovites came, flooding the streets in their thousands. From afar I saw those broad faces, sad, angry, indignant, a stubborn beauty once again swelling up against the ugliness. At home now, I look at one of my favourite of Bel’s photos: Daisy’s pram, its occupant snug and invisible, parked on Red Square. Despite myself, I miss it all.

9 getting it on IT WAS IN THE town where Vlad the Impaler was born that I first saw people having sex in public. I don’t just mean an alfresco shag, I mean going hammer and tongs in broad daylight. On a picnic blanket. In a playground. With an audience. They even brought along a ghetto-blaster with which to provide a soundtrack. Bel and I didn’t spot them at first. It was a crisp spring morning in the Transylvanian town of Sighisoara. We were on a small break from life in Mum’s hometown in Hungary, exploring Transylvania before plunging deeper into Romania, eventually making it all the way to a little fishing village in the Danube Delta, just a kilometre or so from where one arm of the great river spills into the Black Sea. The last stage of the journey was a long ferry ride, one rendered longer by our travelling companions, who’d insisted on warming us by the wharf with a glass of what might have been two-stroke. Some of the villages we came to were accessible only by boat and, as we approached, the entire population would turn out to see us, livestock included. One of the most heartbreakingly comic moments of that trip came as we pulled out from one of the villages. The human merriment went on, the hubbub of their voices taking forever to fade as we nosed back out into the current. But the animals—goats, chickens, geese, pigs—all sagged in a pantomime of grief. I can still see them turning sadly away and trudging back to the humdrum reality of boat-free life. But before we got to the wild end of the Danube, we had Transylvania and the many delights of Sighisoara. Bel and I had already been in Eastern Europe for long enough that a small chessboard seemed like a perfectly logical thing to pack for a picnic. Meandering about in a vain attempt to burn off at least some of the morning’s pastry banquet, we made it a short way up a hill and found a very agreeable park that included a small playground. We set up our chessboard and got to work, sliding those first pawns out into the chequered field of battle. A brace of young children arrived to play on the swings and take turns on a slippery slide that, unlike my favourite one in Hungary, looked like it had been designed purely as a slippery slide and did not double as some sort of brutal character test. We hadn’t been playing long, possibly long enough to start manoeuvring the first bits of heavy artillery out among the scattered ranks of pawns, when the young couple arrived. They were raven-haired and fine-boned, and the pallor of their skin spoke of a country barely emerged from a long winter. A picnic blanket was spread out, the boombox activated. I was irritated by the music for a moment, then checked myself—I was not yet ready to be a grumpy old man. We played on until one of us noticed. I can’t say for sure now whether it was Bel or me, but one of us caught the movement out of the corner of an eye. A small intake of breath, a silent nudge and then we were both watching. It was his buttocks we saw first, owing to the fact they were impossible to miss. Pale to the point of luminous and pumping away like an oil derrick, they were—from our point of view at least—the centre-piece of the arrangement. Her legs were splayed, her fingernails bright as they dug into his back—but that bum just kept hogging the view. The kids on the swings were only a handful of metres away, but they didn’t seem to notice. It was a reciprocal arrangement— the couple paid them no attention, either. They just kept right on fucking. Bel and I were only in our late twenties at this point. But as we glanced at our chessboard, then at each other, then over at those rhythmic buttocks, then back at our chessboard, we suddenly felt very old and staid. On the plus side, I thought at least those kids didn’t have to be taught about the birds and the bees. The couple came and went, and the chess game finally drew to a close. Bel beamed. ‘Checkmate!’ One of the more traditional ways for kids to get their first inkling about the sweaty, tangled splendour of sex is to stumble in on their parents enjoying that most special of cuddles. For better or worse, this was not within my range of possibilities when I was growing up. Instead, an education of sorts was furnished by the school playground—well, probably less ‘education’ and more ‘flimsy pile of rumours and guesswork’. It was bolstered a bit by one of the boys in my street, who always seemed to be up to date with the lexicon. ‘Vagina’ sounded so exotic, so mysterious. Even more so, here, as his pronunciation was off: the word reached our ears as ‘vageena’. It was deeply jarring when we were set straight and it took quite some time for my brain finally to accept the proper pronunciation and eject ‘vageena’ as the imposter it was. But as the saying goes, don’t knock someone for mispronouncing a word—it means they learnt it from reading a book. In this case, that book was Where Did I Come From?What a revelation it was when our resident sex expert showed us all those heartily nourished, naked, fecund cartoon folk guiding us into the land of love and procreation. Suddenly, adulthood seemed a whole lot more interesting. As I got around I found myself looking at every grown-up—friends’ parents, teachers, random passersby, shopkeepers, police, soccer referees—and wondered, do they? And why aren’t they at home doing it right now? Then I looked at my parents and these thoughts ceased. For a little bit. It used to be such a big thing, friends quizzing each other about whether they’d sat down with their kids and had ‘the chat’. But why fret about it when you can take that most beloved approach: outsourcing. When Leo’s school announced a sex-education evening, there was both relief and rejoicing in our house. Except, notably, from Leo. By that point he was nine and a keen nudist at home. But at the approach of a special school session in which he and his mates were going to learn about what their mums and dads got up to nine months before they were born—a lesson learnt while sitting next to their mums and dads—a quiet self-consciousness descended. I was counting the sleeps. Leo possibly wasn’t sleeping. ‘Daddy’s very keen to come along as well,’ Bel told him, which didn’t seem to help. Then the big day arrived; I dropped the ball and was too late leaving the office to make it. The only thing that softened my grief was Bel’s thoughtful texts from the front line. ‘You’d love this!!’ she began, deploying her rare double exclamation marks. Then she texted an example of a question from the sex educator: ‘What are the two things that can come out of the penis?’ As I was to hear later, the atmosphere in the hall was festive. Except around Leo. It kicked up a gear as the teacher asked, ‘How do your mum and dad show they love each other?’ The first child invited to share their answer said, ‘They open a bottle of wine’. This was met with wild acclaim. Then it was on to more diagrams and a demonstration of labour, complete with audience participation. I got home just in time to catch them coming up the street. My fretting about missing out evaporated a little when I saw Leo’s face. ‘So, how was it?’ I asked innocently. Within a day he’d be back to relaxed, domestic nudity. But in that moment he flashed me a look, his eyes blazing white and blue, and I realised I’d just seen the expression that, more powerfully than anything written, said one simple thing: ‘Burn my eyeballs.’

There’s sex education to be gained from this world. As I have discovered, there is also sex education to be gained from the next. There’s also a time and place for both, and sometimes what counts is what gets left out. I have felt grateful to my mother on many occasions, but never so much as I did the day she didn’t tell my kids about the time she shagged a ghost. That she would show such restraint was not a foregone conclusion. Aided and abetted by Eszter, Mum was reviving her sporadic old lunchtime tradition of whipping up a supernatural frenzy. Ladling out the soup, the pair of them powered their way through old favourites: the haunted house; the haunted flat; the other haunted flat; the gravity-defying vegetables; the disembodied footsteps; the oh-my-God-Jimmy-when-you-were-a-baby-I-saw-two-red-eyesfloating-above-your-cot-oh-my-God-ohmy-God; and so forth. Daisy and Leo had until this point largely dodged the family ghost experience. This is possibly because life had become so self-sufficiently weird that reaching for the paranormal would have been gilding the lily. But not today. The kids listened quietly as their grandmother and aunt regaled them with tales of hauntings in various family abodes over the years. ‘… then I heard someone brushing their teeth but when I went to the bathroom. THERE WAS NO ONE THERE!’ On another occasion, Laszlo had been present for the ghost marathon, smiling quietly to himself as each of the old hits was pulled out of the supernatural jukebox. ‘Good to know they were into dental hygiene,’ he’d said dryly when the bathroom poltergeist put in its inevitable appearance. But he wasn’t around to add his commentary this time, and the kids were able to hear every word without interruption. This made me uneasy. What the kids couldn’t know was that there was one tale that began, ‘Once, when I was in bed …’ As lunch went on, I could sense Mum’s ‘special’ ghost story—the original phantom menace—hovering invisibly in the dining room with us, ready to manifest itself in all its horror. As I nervously clenched and unclenched my fists under the table, I remembered the terrible effect it had on me the first time I heard it. I was in my mid-thirties and by then I’d witnessed birth, death, divorce, illness, thousands of joys, hundreds of despairs and—as discussed earlier—one threat of live organ removal in a social setting. All this meant that, emotionally at least, I was semi-prepared to cope with the impact. But how prepared would the kids be? Eszter kept us on safer ground. ‘Remember all the weird stuff in my flat in Surry Hills?’ she said, reeling off the apparitions, the inexplicable draughts and chills, the blood on the door handle one morning, the cat that freaked out at random moments and backed into corners with its fur standing on end, the glasses arranged into ranks during the night and filled to the brim with water. I watched Leo take it all in with a young boy’s wide eyes, and Daisy with a newly minted teenager’s scepticism. None of this was going to slow Mum and Eszter as they revelled in one of their only shared hobbies. Ghost stories are the calm eye of the storm that is their relationship. Given there is so much in life that drives wedges between them, it is fitting that visitors from the afterlife bring them together. ‘Jimmy, do you remember the jumping onion?’ Mum suddenly recalled, returning to a cherished memory of the only supernatural vegetable-shifter we’d experienced—possibly a greengrocer who’d returned from the netherworld. Yes, I remembered the jumping onion. Or I tell myself I remember it. But did it jump? Or was it just a poorly stacked vegetable succumbing to gravity? I’m sure it fell upwards … ‘Oh my God, that flat was haunted,’ cried Mum. ‘Haunted!’ At this point she became aware of the greatest horror of all—her food going uneaten. ‘No pancakes until you finish your soup!’ I remembered so much of it, though as Mum waded into memories of visions and phantom spider webs draping themselves across her face back in our European days, I wondered if there’d been times she’d just been hallucinating on the mushrooms she picked in the woods. Daisy took it all in then declared with a chiselled-in-granite finality, ‘None of it is real’. The ghost stories petered out before Mum was able to reach for her trump card—unlike years before, in that very room, when Mum had suddenly stared at me and Eszter, her eyes gleaming. ‘Once, when I was in bed …’ She then described the invisible, randy presence that climbed in with her. She described what followed. And, with growing animation, what followed that. Eszter and I had put down our spoons. Ghosts or no ghosts, there’s nothing so freaky as the first time one of your parents talks about having sex.

10 sleepless ONE OF THE UPSIDES of insomnia is that it teaches you to appreciate the melodiousness of crickets. By 3 a.m. on a warm night, they sound almost symphonic, firing up in different sections just outside the bedroom window and working their way through one movement after another. It makes the time pass almost pleasantly on the slow journey towards dawn. When the weather cools and the crickets fall silent, the lot of the insomniac is harder. The only sounds to keep you going through winter nights in my neighbourhood are the odd hoon, bats bickering in the trees and the pitter-patter of what might be possums or really big rats. For me, these all-but-sleepless nights come in waves. There are nights when my brain lets me know it’s going to be all systems go. Other nights I can be drifting off when suddenly all the lights come back on in my brain. It’s not like there’s necessarily anything to illuminate, more like someone flicking on all the lights in an empty office. So I’m free to lie there staring at the ceiling, pondering, wondering, finding pointless regrets and random joys, and having sudden brainwaves that make perfect sense until re-examined in the morning light. I try to stop thinking altogether and fail, then finally fall back on cursing the fact I’m still awake. I’ve always envied Bel’s ability to fall asleep quickly. Likewise Leo, who has a number of amusing routines for burning off surplus energy of an evening (the post-shower nudie dance never fails to get a chuckle), then climbs into bed and, after a quick perusal of a soccer magazine, nods off as if he’s just unplugged himself. Daisy takes longer, but eventually she makes it to the land of nod, too. Leaving just me. After a few nights of this, I’m feeling pretty exotic when I get up, like everything’s not quite joined together. When I stop moving, my brain keeps rocking. I stare pointlessly at my computer screen. I keep tipping more coffee into myself, hoping the caffeine will finally reach critical mass. I get nervous someone’s going to say something challenging to me, such as ‘Hello’. By the time I limp through at the other end of the day, all I can think of is that lovely, lovely bed with its soft spread of white sheet and the welcoming committee of pillows. And yet when I get back in, almost delirious with exhaustion, I’m back where I was, as if suspended a few centimetres above unconsciousness by a steel cable. My mind wanders in all sorts of directions, then eventually, so does the rest of me. I go to check on the kids and the blissedout looks on their faces. Sometimes, they talk in their sleep, which is a bit of a bonus. I’ve heard Leo chuckling in a dream, and Daisy getting cross with him in one of hers. I guzzle milk, I sip Scotch. I’ll take a shower or go for a walk under the stars. I’ll head out to the shed to check the family collection of pythons, which, in the warmer months at least, are as nocturnal as me. They stir curiously in the moonlight, tongues flickering. And then it’s back to bed, with what’s left of my exhausted imagination staggering along either to latch on to odd things and over-think them, or, as has been the case a few times, to misfire altogether and fail to register any increment of cerebral vitality. During the small hours of one particularly conscious night a few years back, I dismissed a solitary, sturdy bang that punctuated the silence as a car backfiring. Come daylight, as I sat hollow-eyed over coffee, I was surprised to learn that the bang had in fact been a bomb, and that a Hell’s Angels clubhouse had been its target. My insomnia settled in for a few days after that. There’s always one of my favourite dad jokes. Q. What do you call an agnostic, dyslexic insomniac? A. Someone who lies awake at night pondering the existence of dog. But that just gets me on to the fact that my kids have never had a puppy. Nor for that matter have they had much to do with God. Thus does my mind quietly, fruitlessly spiral towards daybreak.

11 off my faith UNLESS YOU BELIEVE IN the possibility of eternal damnation, the absence of at least a bit of a Christian education diminishes your children in one most significant regard: they miss a lot of the jokes in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Come the mass crucifixion scene at the end, mine did at least sing along to ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’; they may not have known their Bible, but they sure knew their Python songs thanks to a stash of them they found on my old iPod. This discovery of theirs counted as a mixed blessing. I loved it that they could sing along to ‘Bruces’ Philosophers Song’ (‘Socrates himself is particularly missed …’) and ‘The Lumberjack Song’, and were even on board with the intricacies of ‘Eric the Half-a-Bee’. But when I hit pause during the opening notes of ‘Sit on My Face’ and Leo and Daisy went ahead and performed a perfect a cappellaversion of it anyway, I embarked on a bit of soul-searching. It was only the day Bel informed me she’d come home to find them both naked and dancing to ‘Every Sperm is Sacred’ that I decided, all in all, that it added up to a good thing. But I sometimes wonder if we should have let things slide like this. It’s not that I hope they become religious, just that they develop a familiarity with those stories that are as much of cultural bedrock as Shakespeare is. And I really, really want them to know why the Jehovah scene in Life of Brian is hilarious. When I think back to my childhood, and of being gently nudged along by Dad to the local Uniting Church each Sunday, the first thing that pops into my head is the hands of one of the guest ministers. He was younger than our usual crew, and sounded powered by something more urgent. While many of the others had gently lulling voices redolent of fireside chats, his seemed to contain the fire itself. Unusually, I was able to concentrate on the sermon from start to finish, rather than default to my usual approach, which was to daydream so deeply it came as a shock when Dad tapped me on the shoulder to stand to sing ‘This is the Day that the Lord Has Made’. We later discovered the minister had worked overseas and, thanks to his beliefs, had been imprisoned for a spell. But afterwards as I went to receive my weekly payment of heavily diluted cordial and a biscuit, I overheard one of our fellow churchgoers whispering loudly to another: ‘Did you see his hands? Don’t look like they’ve ever done an honest day’s work.’ One of the following weekends, I dragged Dad off to a Catholic Church to sample their spiritual wares. After all, Catholicism seemed pretty popular in our cul-de-sac, and I was fairly sure they didn’t talk about the priest’s hands. But the church was huge and we didn’t know anyone there except for God, so we returned to the bosom of the Uniting Church. The weekly double of Sunday school and then the service was gruelling, and it came as a relief when I finally graduated from Sunday school and it became just the service, encounters with the Almighty that doubled as morning lullabies. Unlike what was waiting for me around the corner. It was during one of the biannual council clean-ups in my neighbourhood that my religious awareness got a jolt. Trawling through the piles of potential treasure people had chucked out onto their nature strips, I found a box stuffed with the religious comics of hardcore American evangelist Jack Chick. I’d never seen anything like it. In hindsight it was hilariously heavy-handed stuff, and the God it portrayed was at best an insufferable, narcissistic arsehole with a raging ego and significant anger-management issues. It was no King James, which at least rendered some of those characteristics more poetically. But at the time, I was electrified and would flick through them in secret like they were a stash of porn. I learnt that evolution was a hoax and that bad times were afoot for Catholics, Freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and other perverts and degenerates. In the Chick universe, this seemed to be most of humanity. Yet amid all the imagery—the rivers of blood that were coming, the wholesale punishment destined for deviants, the cruel nonbelievers who mocked the faithful with ‘haw haw’ laughs—I got particularly stuck on one of the titles: This Was Your Life! The action commences with a pipe-smoking, booze-drinking man tapped by the Grim Reaper. So far, so bad. Proving the point that even when things are bad they can always turn worse, his soul gets plucked from the freshly buried coffin by an angel and taken to heaven, whereupon he discovers his entire life has been recorded by God, a sort of super Stasi officer who appears as a faceless giant sitting crossly upon a glowing throne. The hapless stiff has to sit with an angel and watch his entire life projected onto a screen as a long and deeply shameful film. At the end of it, God inquires of the angel if the stiff’s name appears in the Book of Life. The angel replies that, regrettably, it does not. Whereupon God, like the universe’s ultimate bouncer, gives the biblical equivalent of ‘Nah mate, members only’. Pointing out the exit with a celestial forefinger, he booms, ‘Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels’. And lo, the stiff’s winged chaperone carts him downstairs and tosses him into a lake of flames. I nearly shat myself, and for many months afterwards my nights were haunted by the terror of watching my life beneath that pitiless, all-seeing gaze. What would God say about all those times my mind wandered in church? What about that time I stole a schoolmate’s toy Stormtrooper purely because I was trying to build a battalion and wasn’t in the mood to let insufficient pocket money get in the way of my military expansionism? And most pressingly, what would he say about all those wanks? I sometimes wonder if this was the beginning of my insomnia. (A couple of years back, I had a little flashback in an Armenian church in the Iranian city of Esfahan. The art spread above us was a luridly violent warning that hell was not, as some have tried to suggest, the place where all the interesting people go and where you can at least have a drink and a smoke. It was an all-impaling, stabbing, slicing, disembowelling and eyeball-gouging affair, evidently created with a lip-smacking satisfaction at the thought of what awaited the unworthy—it was Jack Chick with better draughtsmanship. Between that and the lingering focus on Jesus’s horrendous suffering on the cross, it got pretty draining. I mentioned in passing to my friend Javad that I preferred the mosques. He beamed. ‘Welcome to Islam!’) Bit by bit we fell away from God, Olivia and I going first. Dad hung in there a lot longer, not least for the social life. And as Dad was a sole parent on the other side of the world from his family, the people from the church were a valuable safety net. When he was laid out with pneumonia and entertaining us with descriptions of his hallucinations (‘Everything’s turning into frogs!’), the church crew kept me and Olivia fed. They were like extended family, and some became close friends. Mum’s main involvement with God appears to have been more straightforward, based to quite some extent on deriving cold satisfaction from the belief that he is carefully recording every sin committed against her and will one day activate his pitiless and decidedly Old Testament–style judgment. ‘He watches them, he see what they do,’ she’ll say with the air of someone biding their time. There’s a bit of Chick in her, too. ‘I don’t believe in God,’ wrote Julian Barnes, ‘but I miss him.’ The closest I’ve got to understanding that has been in my years of coming and going in Russia, where I’ve always found myself drawn to churches in a way that happens to me nowhere else. The first time it hit me was in a small church in the wintry countryside, domes softly gleaming in the muted light. As I stood there in that pewless space—the warm fug of beeswax from serried ranks of candles overwhelming the frigid blasts from the opening door, the gold of the icons like constellations on smoke-darkened walls, the voices rising and plunging in a polyphony of magisterial sadness—I was overcome by the aching beauty of it all, and more than anything, that deep, unquenchable yearning for something higher. I have felt faint stirrings of it in European synagogues, their empty pews surely filled with ghosts, and in

the great mosques of Esfahan, where God is approached in splendours of geometry. I was almost overwhelmed by it in my twenties, when I wandered into the cathedral of Pécs and found a full rehearsal of Mozart’s Requiemunder way. But it was in that little church in the middle of the snow that I came closest to dropping on my knees. It is a yearning, but one I know will go no further; it will just be left to stir slowly and ceaselessly within me like some ancestral memory. I don’t believe in God, but I miss him. By the by, Barnes asked his philosophy-teaching brother what he thought of the sentiment. He replied, ‘Soppy’. Our household faiths have followed the other traditional paths, the finite beliefs that run through early childhood until suddenly they don’t. The final pillar of magical belief fell when Leo was nine and we were preparing to set off on our latest mad family odyssey into the desert. In the midst of plotting our route and, almost as crucially, our iPod play-lists, he piped up and asked, ‘How will the Easter Bunny find us?’ Bel and I made the mistake of thinking logically, or as logically as one can when fielding questions from small boys about chocolate-dispensing rabbits. ‘We’ll be in Broken Hill, and the Easter Bunny will just find you there,’ said Bel. ‘He’ll probably just follow your smell,’ I added. ‘Are you sure he’ll find us?’ Leo pressed us. ‘Of course,’ I said. That’s when I noticed a tiny snort. Leo was struggling to contain a giggle. In comedy terms, this is known as ‘corpsing’. My first memory of it is watching Spike Milligan and John Bluthal on television, struggling to get through one of their scenes without cracking up. That the script was a masterpiece of ludicrousness made this an uphill struggle, and Milligan stopped mid-sentence, his eyes wild with laughter desperate to escape. If anything, Dad used to guffaw even harder at those moments than at the scripted stuff, and I came to look forward to them as much as he did. So it was hard not to smile at my son. ‘Leo!’ barked Daisy. It was a mock-serious admonishment. For Daisy, three-and-a-bit years Leo’s senior, logic had long since made its cool, relentless inroads, swiftly eradicating Santa Claus (‘I know that it’s you and Mum who bring the presents’), the Tooth Fairy (‘I heard you giggling as you crept out of my room’) and the Easter Bunny (‘Oh please’). And yet, despite being an enthusiastic nonbeliever, Daisy was happy to play along with things to protect Leo’s endearingly persistent faith. The memory of those early Christmases still warms me, not least the explosions of joy and the looks of wonder on those little faces as they clambered on to our bed in the pre-dawn dimness, as agog about the fact St Nick had been in their room as they were about the presents. In more recent years, Daisy would give me a sly ‘Thanks, Santa’ while leaving Leo to his musings on the air velocity of reindeer and such. At least Santa won’t be getting any more credit for presents for which we’ve slogged our way through the nine circles of the local shopping centre, a place that come the festive season is equal parts Dante, Hieronymus Bosch and Mariah Carey. On the downside, I can’t knock off a beer and say, ‘It’s for Santa’. But it’s the Tooth Fairy I’ll miss the most. There was always a touch of bomb-defusing vibe about extracting a tooth from beneath a sleeping child’s head. Your heart beats so loudly, you’re sure you’re only a couple of seconds away from eyelids shooting open and a myth collapsing all around you in a tear-sodden mess. Also, kids always seem to sleep more lightly and floorboards squeak more brightly when you’re playing the role of a winged fang merchant. Then, just when you think you’ve got away with it and are heading for the door, you—with the prosaic, cruel inevitability of our age—tread on Lego. Perhaps it’s because there was so much more to work against that the Tooth Fairy brought out the best in me. Not content merely to deposit money, I began to leave dustings of gold glitter by the kids’ pillows. And then it dawned on me that the aquarium in their room was the perfect medium on which the Tooth Fairy could write her messages of love and appreciation. The first time I did this, I waited for the kids to turn on the aquarium light and have the message on the glass suddenly reveal itself. The effect was gratifying. Now it’s done. The Easter Bunny is the one to which I had the least attachment. It never felt like more than a case of: stick eggs under shrubs, stand back and watch. And once he’d visited us for the last time, I no longer had to fib about the main ingredient in my ragout.

12 for special occasions DAISY WAS VERY SMALL when she first swore. Dressed in a blue fairy costume, nappy bulging out the bottom, she looked up at us with big, clear eyes and announced, ‘Bollocks’. There was only one possible culprit. Bel fixed me with a glare that sat somewhere on the spectrum between ‘a bit frosty’ and ‘Siberian death blizzard’. I had a sudden flashback to when I was small and Olivia even smaller and she’d rashly piped up with the same word in Dad’s presence. ‘Did your sister just say “bollocks”?’ he asked, rhetorically. ‘Pretty sure she said “mollusc”,’ I ventured. ‘Bollocks,’ Olivia repeated. The five minutes that followed were dark. Anyway, Bel has always insisted that when we first met, I drank very little and did not swear. To this day, I do not know with whom she has me confused. Lurking in there is a whole thesis about the discombobulating nature of love’s first mad rush. Anyway, to cut to the chase, I enjoy a bit of profanity. Rude words are the croutons in the soup of language, the cracker up the clacker of speech. And when it comes to releasing a bit of pressure, it beats bursting a capillary. As Billy Connolly once mused, ‘People say it’s limited vocabulary that makes you swear. I don’t think so. I know, ohhh, at least 127 words and I still prefer fuck’. Perhaps it’s just that I work in a swearier-than-average trade. People cling to the expression ‘swears like a sailor’ as if it means something. But my main memory of navy boys falls upon the Americans my big sister used to bring home, precocious teenager that she was. They were all very polite and addressed my mother as ‘ma’am’, which appeared to outweigh any concerns she might have had about her daughter picking up sailors. By way of contrast, every journalist I know who’s gone to work in the outside world has spent time in a state of shock. As one former colleague lamented to me, ‘I said [very bad word] on my first day and everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at me’. She seemed as unprepared as a time traveller arriving straight from a medieval banquet into a posh restaurant and learning the hard way that lobbing a half-gnawed chicken leg over your shoulder just isn’t done. Nevertheless, Bel’s concern about swearing around the kids is possibly a valid one, so I’ve tried alternatives. Swearing in Hungarian (one benefit of growing up in a bilingual household) worked for a while, and also helped me maintain my Magyar vocabulary as it pertains to livestock and people’s ancestry. Even that is not without its risks. I once absent-mindedly slipped a bit of anatomical Hungarian slang into a small travel piece about Budapest; look, it could have happened to anyone. On the plus side, this cock-up gave an idea of just how many of Mum’s compatriots were reading the travel section; some of their emails were splendidly terse. Nevertheless, I’ll mention in passing that one beloved Hungarian expression wishes that its recipient—how shall I put it— experiences a reversal of the usual order and gets mounted by a horse. It’s written as lófasz a seggedbe and it was as much a part of the aural backdrop of my childhood as cicadas and cricket commentary in the summer, and fireworks for the week or so either side of the Queen’s Birthday holiday. Except that unlike any of those, lófasz a seggedbe knew no seasons. For those who need a phonetic guide, try this: law foss o sheg ed be. Even here a little assistance doesn’t go astray— pronounce the freestanding ‘o’ like you would the ‘o’ in hot, and the ‘be’ like you’re saying ‘bet’ but bailing out just before the ‘t’. Once you get the hang of it, it has a befittingly cantering rhythm. I taught it to Bel on the grounds that it’s fun and handy for getting out of sticky spots—a reversal of the action it describes. She took to it methodically, as a good student would, practising slowly and repeatedly—including once in the back of a taxi, where I had to overcome my reluctance to break her stride and remind her that we had just arrived in Hungary. The driver was hunched over the steering wheel, blushing. One I didn’t teach her contains no animals whatsoever but is one of the finest—and, it would seem, rarest—Hungarian curses I’ve yet encountered. It translates as ‘If you don’t shut your mouth I’ll climb in there and shit myself’. You’d need to be pretty steamed to make it work, and even more importantly you’d need a decent run-up just to get enough momentum to carry you through to the end, but it would surely be worth it. On the milder front, the slang for being in a bad way—especially financially —translates as ‘under the frog’s arse’. Around my kids, though, Magyar rudeness counts only as a partial solution. Another approach is to use innocuous substitutes. I have the occasional shot at using ‘adjectival’, as in: ‘Your room is an adjectival pigsty’. Another that was in heavy use in our house for a while was ‘shazbot’, the alien curse from Mork & Mindy. The other was ‘deutschmark’, just because, all things considered, it is a very funny word that trips beautifully from the tongue in times of stress. A little reminder from this experimental era are our pet turtles, named Shazbot and Deutschmark. They appeared on TV once on a kids-and-pets segment on the Disney Channel with Daisy and Leo, who declined to mention the turtles’ names. So how do you measure progress? A few years after Daisy launched her ‘bollocks’ on an unprepared world, Leo had his first swear. About as small as Daisy had been on the day of that testicular spectacular, Leo was alone in the living room, happily building a tower out of blocks. All went well until some engineering mishap precipitated the tower’s collapse. We heard the crash from the next room and sat in a tense hush, waiting for the tears. The tears didn’t come, just a few seconds of silence, then a single word: ‘Bugger’. On balance, I thought this counted as an improvement and gave myself a pat on the back. There are lapses, most amusingly when Bel—of all people—said ‘arsehole’, and then, in a moment of goalpost-shifting so brazen I could only salute, pretended it wasn’t rude. The kids decided they’d been granted a special maternal licence and enjoyed using it until I threatened to cut their pocket money. Tending to set back that tactic are the times when swearing has proved profitable for them. In illustration of which, we once visited a certain cartoonist friend … One of my great terrors when inheriting the Strewth column in The Australian was waiting to see what crimes Bill Leak would commit to my face. Rather than having their photo at the top, whoever was in the Strewth saddle was on the receiving end of one of Bill’s caricatures. ‘It’s a tricky balance,’ he once explained to me. ‘They can’t be too horrible, they can’t be not horrible— they’ve got to be just horrible enough.’ He sounded like a terrible Goldilocks. I awaited my fate in a cold sweat. The fear was hardly unwarranted. When Bill painted Labor Party powerbroker Graham Richardson for the Archibald Prize, Richo’s response was at least refreshing for its lack of ambiguity. ‘I am fat and I am ugly,’ he conceded. ‘But I am not that fat, and I am not that fucking ugly.’ Bill was undoubtedly thrilled. When I described him as the Placido Domingo of fruity language, he was well chuffed. For Bill, swearing was not to be wielded like a mere club but was to be treated as a gleeful, life-affirming thing. That said, at times he made it feel more like a form of punctuation. And it didn’t matter who was around. Daisy and Leo were still fairly small when we took them to visit him, and he quickly realised there was no way he was going to be able to curb his tongue without doing himself a serious mischief. So he popped into the kitchen and, with his dog gazing at

him adoringly the whole time, returned with a jar, giving the kids a wink as he put it on the table. ‘As I was saying,’ he said, launching back into some magnificently scabrous anecdote. Inevitably, swiftly, the first f-bomb left his lips and the jar tinkled with a gold coin. More coins followed in quick succession. It was like a more agreeable form of cash for comment. The kids would normally have been aghast at hearing such language, but Bill had changed the equation and they merely smiled as every shiny piece of currency dropped into the jar. That jar kept tinkling through the afternoon. Leo and Daisy were loaded by the time we left. Bill carefully divided the loot between them, counting the coins into two separate bags that made a sound like sleighbells as we got into the car. Bel and I were a bit worried we might hear our offspring repeat one of Bill’s ‘special’ words, but they never did. They did, however, keep asking, ‘When are we visiting Bill again?’ Of course, Bill didn’t need to rely on swearing for a memorable turn of phrase. I once wrote something he loved so much he rang me at the office, launching with his standard, ‘You dear, dear man’, before hitting me with this sentence: ‘If you had tits on your back I’d marry you.’ I can’t for the life of me remember what I wrote, but Bill’s words are lodged firmly in my head. As are many of the words of my friend the writer Elisabeth Wynhausen. A decent proportion of her words were from the salty end of the spectrum, but she delivered them with a zest that made it feel more like a celebration than a curse. And it also felt like a solid sign she wasn’t holding back anything—no enigma, no guesswork. Against the odds, or at least in the teeth of expectation, it was Elisabeth who also fashioned out of the bluest air one of the finest clean curses I have ever known. It debuted in my ears when I made mention of someone for whom neither of us had yet succeeded in developing a liking. Elisabeth’s response was tart: ‘Oh, that special occasion.’ I let it slide, but later in the week she referred to someone she viewed even more dimly as … drum roll … ‘a complete special occasion’. The beginning of wisdom, as the narrator in Monkey taught us, is to say ‘I don’t know’. Accordingly, I asked Elisabeth for a translation. She smiled the smile that told you a disgrace was about to be gleefully committed, and nodded towards our colleague Natalie O’Brien. ‘I said the “c” word one time too many in front of Natalie and she said, “Elisabeth, you should save that word for special occasions”.’ There is a particular joy in letting your tongue off the chain, but I do want Daisy and Leo to understand that creativity is the key. As with anything else, sheer repetition, poverty of imagination and overuse dulls and eventually kills the magic. There’s a small part of me that wishes they’d been with me to eavesdrop one time I was on the train heading north from Sydney, an hour of roughness that would have made that point perfectly. I didn’t see them, just heard their voices as they got on board. Everyone heard their voices; even the bloke plugged into his iPod flinched when they really got going. One sounded young, aged about thirty, his voice high, lilting almost into the realm of sweetness. ‘Come on, this isn’t like hitchhiking. You were the one who wanted to get the train.’ But there is no light without shade. His travelling companion sounded decades older and infinitely more short-tempered, his anger conveyed in a voice rougher than a cement mixer full of rusty anvils. And he was sweary, favouring one curse so heavily and dragging out its solitary vowel so much it had the feel of a foreign word. And somehow with this guy, it feels better to write it that way. ‘Don’t phaarken push it!’ he began as we rolled across Sydney’s northern fringe. He could project all right; they would have heard him in the next carriage. ‘Don’t phaarken tell me how to use a phaarken train!’ And on he thundered, a facsimile of the screaming matches between drunks around the train station near where I work, except that in this case just one party was doing all the heavy lifting. I shifted in my seat, rueing that I hadn’t sat in one of the designated quiet carriages, a decision I’d made on the grounds that they tend to contain people who shoosh each other a lot. Here there was just a lot of phaarken. Loud phaarken. So much phaarken it was hard to work out if it constituted the bricks or the mortar of his speech. It would have been interesting to see how the shooshers would have reacted. Then the tone changed, Mr Young waiting expertly for little gaps in Mr Gruff’s wall of phaarken to utter the magic words ‘Come have a smoke. Come talk.’ Nicotine had a soothing effect. As they returned from the gap between the carriages, we emerged over the Hawkesbury River, which the setting sun had turned to beaten copper. They reacted in their separate ways. ‘Wow! That is beautiful.’ ‘Aw, phaarken look at that.’ With the tension more or less behind them, Mr Young and Mr Gruff were ready to look to the future, specifically their plans to hitchhike to Byron Bay. Mr Young turned out to be a natural team-worker, drawing the old women around him into a discussion over which station near Newcastle would get them closest to the freeway. Driven either by innate helpfulness or simply relief that Mr Gruff wasn’t shouting phaarken, the women threw themselves into the effort. Mr Young expressed his gratitude with a flourish. ‘Thank you, ladies. You’re all young at heart. You know what they say, you’re only as old as the male you’re feeling.’ There was a small, indulgent chuckle from the women. ‘Yes, I’ve heard that one,’ one offered. Mr Young was on the beginnings of a roll, though Mr Gruff proved less than enthusiastic about his mate’s gags-for-info plan. ‘I’m going to tell a Michael Jackson joke!’ ‘No!’ ‘It’s not dirty.’ ‘No!’ ‘Well, it’s dirty but clean, if you know what I mean.’ ‘Phaarken no!’ Worn down by consensus, Mr Young abandoned comedy and moved on to songs. After much publicly workshopped consideration, he settled on a song by Matchbox Twenty. ‘Now you might like it, you might hate it,’ he said, before offering a short treatise on the life-improving qualities of music. Mr Gruff was having none of it. ‘Stop.’ It was here that the first sign of tetchiness emerged from Young, and it took one of the most timeless forms of conflict: artistic differences. ‘This is my style. If you don’t like it, go … have a smoke.’ If his singing voice didn’t match the sweetness of his speaking one, he made up for it with his democratic zeal in entertaining everyone around him. Everyone except the one man who, like the slave charged with reminding Caesar of his mortality, was hell bent on keeping his mate’s feet on the ground. ‘You sound like you’re cutting a bloke’s throat.’ And so they went on. After the obvious initial stress of the start of the journey, they settled into a gentle seesawing rhythm, achieving something like balance. The police were waiting for them at the next station. I saw Mr Young and Mr Gruff for the first time as they stood on the platform, shoulders slumped as they assisted with inquiries. Mr Gruff was shirtless and, to my surprise, looked about the same age as Mr Young. It was as if his voice had been through a time accelerator. The train pulled away without them, the dream of Byron left to dangle precariously in the evening light.

13 generations WITHOUT WANTING TO SOUND all Scott Morrison about it, I owe my life to coal. Dad was a mining engineer who was sent to help install some machinery in a Hungarian coalmine. The first time he went was in 1969, and his meeting with the mine directors was delayed while they watched the moon landing on a television on the other side of a locked door. Communism was still in full swing and they really didn’t need a Westerner in there with them watching America winning the space race. It wasn’t long until he met Mum, who was working in the mine office. (Many years later, when I quizzed them separately about it, Mum put aside her almost religiously held detestation of my father and got dizzy talking about how handsome he was, how shy he was, how successful and occasionally crafty in the ways of courtship he nevertheless was, and most importantly, how very lovely his car was. A Western car! Not like the Trabants and other East German trash that cluttered the streets. Dad, on the other hand, looked deeply uncomfortable, claimed a patchy memory and kept shifting his topic back to that mine, about which his memory was impeccable and preserved in Blu-ray-level high definition.) Love won the day and marriage followed, as eventually did I. Ultimately, it was the black stuff that brought us from Europe to Australia, the Australian Coal Board sponsoring our family’s move. Not that Mum felt the need to be reciprocal about anything, and when she’d had enough of the regional New South Wales town in which the new job had landed us, Dad had to pull the pin on that job too and—with our new budgies, Gyuri and Zsofi, safely packed—we moved to Sydney. We’d been there only eight months. There were still plenty of holes in the ground for Dad to go down in the line of work. One day, he invited me to join him. While I was vaguely curious to see just what Dad did all day, I was quietly more excited about driving down the fabled road that took us to the mine, largely—nay, entirely—because it was where Dad had once rescued a pair of turtles from the traffic and brought them home for my pond. He came through the front door that day with a cardboard box in his arms, inviting me to play a short round of ‘Guess what’. On his face was the same expression he wore when he arrived home with my first puppy (an acquisition long dreamed of by me, but delayed during the custody battle after Dad’s solicitor advised him Mum would try to paint it as a bribe; God love Mum, but this was a shrewd assessment). As I crouched to examine the turtles inside the box, their yellow eyes peering nervously from inside their shells, I came to a conclusion: Dad was essentially Father Christmas, only one who specialised in pets and offered year-round service. Disappointingly, this drive to the mine was turtle-free. We were soon in one of the low, sturdy carriages taking us down the shaft and, as we went, I could barely take my eyes off the circle of daylight as it shrank to nothingness above us. When I was smaller, Dad used to regale me with stories about the mines of his early career in Derbyshire. These tales were populated by men working with picks, men tending carefully to pit ponies and men getting dust in their lungs—all emerging to vistas of slagheaps and snug pubs. My favourite from Dad’s cast of characters was one older man who’d spent too much time underground and devoted a chunk of his time to killing rats, painting them the colours of the local football team and hanging them on display. The man had clearly gone insane in those lamplit tunnels, but as a boy listening to these stories, I merely thought he sounded compellingly gruesome. Dad would also tell me about more recent things, such as methane explosions, roof collapses, death that came in a sudden, greedy hurry. I remember after the explosion in the Appin colliery in 1979, a place he’d worked plenty of shifts, he was very quiet for a few days. Here, in contrast, all seemed bright, cool and orderly. Dad introduced me to some of his colleagues, showed me some of the machinery he’d installed while speaking of it in the manner of a lovesick poet, and presented me with my very own lump of coal. It was the size of a passionfruit and I wrapped it reverently in tissue like some delicate artefact, unwrapping it once in a while to gaze upon it and ponder black lung and electricity and the prehistoric forests and all the ancient sunlight that had gone into making it. ‘So,’ he asked as we rattled our way back towards the surface, ‘any temptation to follow in your father’s footsteps and become a miner?’ There’d been plenty of other careers in his family—his uncle, for example, had been an artist, and there’d been some stabs at farming in South Africa. And somewhere amid the generations there’d even been a doctor who’d wound up as personal physician to a pope. But Dad’s father had been a mining engineer, his grandfather had been a mining engineer. ‘No offence, Dad, but no.’ ‘Good.’ Dad was always a very tactile parent, ever ready to dispense a kiss or a hug or a tickle as needed. Just as I let his and Mum’s divorce guide me, I suspect Dad was in turn guided by his time with his own father, John, a pipe-smoking Scot who approached drinking like a one-man industry. At best, Dad spoke of him with a sort of troubled admiration, one shot through with the sense he’d been a disappointment to him. It always sounded a hard-edged relationship, one that sometimes bordered on formality. And all of this was built around the crater that was the absence of Dad’s slightly older brother, Jim, who never got to crack double digits, carried away by unpasteurised milk and the bovine tuberculosis that lurked within it. Once in a while, Dad would let something slip. After he gave me my bedtime hug one night, he mentioned almost in passing, ‘I never had this with my own father’. I lay awake a long time that night. Dad was only in his mid-twenties when John died. He was on his first overseas holiday, a skiing trip to Norway on which he also had his first encounter with Australians. They made such a good impression on him that their distant country began to grow in his mind when it was clear Mum was never going to settle in England. He also broke his first bone, an experience he got a special pleasure out of reliving for us as we were growing up. ‘The tip of one of my skis ploughed down into some soft snow, and up I went,’ Dad would say, leaving us to savour the comical image of him suspended in the air, ankles strapped to the now perpendicular skis. And then the inevitable pay-off. ‘Oh, the crack of the leg bone as it went! Good grief, I’m sure they could have heard it for miles.’ He always said it in such a wistful way, like a Wordsworth recounting the first time his ears were blessed with lark song. As he lay there in a Norwegian hospital, his plastered leg suspended, news of his father’s death reached him. John had been working in his garden when his overtaxed heart stopped. He never got within cooee of sixty. Dad made it back for the funeral but had to be carried by the vicar through the lumpy churchyard to the graveside. Once when I was very young, I pictured him in the arms of the churchman and asked the first question that popped into my head. ‘Weren’t you embarrassed?’ The faraway look never left his eyes. ‘I was too busy being heartbroken to be embarrassed.’ That was another night I lay awake a long time. Many years later, my aunt Liz—Dad’s little sister and one of the sanest people I’ve ever known—told me the most curious thing. ‘After Dad died, I think I only ever heard Mum mention him once. And that was to say, “He wasn’t the easiest man in the world to live with”. And that was that.’

Dad’s mother, on the other hand, totally doted on him. I never saw him brought so low as the day I picked him up from the airport with her ashes. It was the final fulfilment of a wish she’d expressed to Liz. ‘When I die, I want to go down there!’ she’d said, pointing at the floor. Liz was puzzled at first. ‘I didn’t know if she was talking about hell or the sitting room.’ The penny eventually dropped that she meant Australia. Liz on the other hand suffered from the fundamental defect of not being male. Nagyi was the first card-carrying misogynist I was aware of, and it was something she clung to rigidly even in her final years as she was slipping beneath Alzheimer’s waves. I stayed with her for a few weeks during her penultimate year, a tricky period during which she’d wake shouting at night and pass some of the daytime hiding her nappies behind the radiators. Each day was like a kaleidoscope of time travel in her disintegrating brain. Who I was in her eyes—Dad, Uncle Jim, John or me—really depended on the moment. But most of the time she registered that it was me and she loved chatting and getting dosed with fresh pots of tea. I brought biscuits, and kept the fire blazing with coal from the cellar. Once there was a knock at the door and in came one of the house-helps the council sent around each day. She was new, filling in for one of the regulars Nagyi had grudgingly got used to. She chatted brightly as she went about her work, gamely trying to engage Nagyi in small talk. ‘So, are you from around here then, Mrs Jeffrey?’ Nagyi, who took a wildly disproportionate pride in being from Nottingham (all of 40 kilometres away) and carried herself as though she were only in Derbyshire under sufferance even though she’d been perfectly free to leave for decades, was curt. ‘No. I am not.’ As the poor woman moved on into the kitchen, Nagyi beckoned me closer. ‘You’re not going to leave me alone with that … female, are you?’ It was a different experience with Mum’s parents. Her father, Mihály—or to me, Nagypapa—had by all accounts always been a deeply gentle man, one whose love of animals was entirely without discrimination and hierarchy. I get the sense he took a similar approach to wine, much of which he made himself. But an encounter with a rabid cat in the university laboratory where he worked almost ended him. The rabies didn’t outright kill him, but left him as little more than a wraith, albeit one with a beautiful smile. He never held a grudge against cats, though. The last time he visited us, he spent a lot of time sitting quietly and contentedly on our front verandah, our cat Sooty all but glued to him in a way she never was for almost anyone else. While Nagypapa was a gentle presence, Mum’s mother, Eszter—my other Nagyi—was not. Small, round and tough, she was a dumpling-shaped force of nature in a fetching headkerchief. She was the queen of the short, brutal character assessment, the empress of the sardonic aside. She was a cheek-pincher and a fearsome hugger. She could harangue like it was a martial art in which she had a black belt; every now and then I have a flashback to the time when she and Mum hectored János as a tag team, and I feel a little chill. She had unexpected soft spots, even developing a surprise infatuation with the owner of the little pet shop near Mum’s cafe. He was about fifty years younger than her, but had a well-kempt beard that framed what she was often wont to observe was a lovely smile. And boy she liked to laugh. I once saw Dad laugh so hard during an episode of The Young Ones he actually slid from his armchair onto the floor. But one time, when I was happily ensconced on the sofa with Nagyi watching Laurel and Hardy, she became the only person I ever saw guffaw till her nose bled. As with Dad’s family, Mum’s also had its absence. Her brother Misi was barely more than a toddler when meningitis killed him, and they carried his absence still. Once, when I barely came up to Nagyi’s elbow, she talked about him for a little bit, then lapsed into one of her rare silences and hugged me so hard I thought my lungs might pop. Daisy and Leo have at least had the benefit of not living on the other side of the world from their grandparents. Whenever I think of Daisy and Dad—Granddad, to her—my first image is of her aged two, leading him out the door for one of their adventures. They’d make it only a few metres to the corner when they’d encounter their first fallen frangipani flower. For a while, these were the greatest desire of Daisy’s heart and she’d pick up each one carefully, give it the once-over then hand it to Granddad for closer inspection. These adventures were tectonically slow, but they always came home together a picture of perfect contentment. Coming in three years later, Leo unfortunately missed the window Daisy had had and only really got to know Dad as the dementia was accentuating some of his eccentricities and dragging his little aggressions and hostilities into the foreground. It got to the point where you couldn’t even leave them to play together. I remonstrated with him once after he’d made Leo cry, but Dad was having none of it. ‘He started it,’ he harrumphed, pointing at our sobbing toddler. And yet even then there was the odd bit of silver lining, such as the time Dad was asked to keep young Leo occupied by playing blocks with him. It wasn’t long before Leo was airing his first grievance—it turned out Dad was viewing it as a competition, one in which he intended to give no quarter. ‘This is Granddad’s tower,’ he barked, adding another block to his growing edifice. ‘You build your own.’ Leo went back to his little pile of blocks and watched Dad absorbed in his work. When the time came to leave the house, Leo made it as far as the front door then theatrically came to a stop. ‘I forgot something,’ he said, then ran down the hallway and into the living room, where he kicked over Granddad’s tower. It made a satisfying crash. When you’re from a splintered family, seeing the reverse take place never loses its little sparkle of magic. Even the simplest moments: the kids huddled around a Scrabble board with Granny, their heads almost touching; cutting through their centenarian Great-Granny’s befuddlement and making her smile; learning about sailing from Pa. And when the kids please their Nagyi so much with their raging appetites for her pancakes, I always end up as the collateral damage of her happiness. ‘You and Olivia never used to eat like this,’ Mum will say as Leo pushes another pancake into his face like it’s on a conveyor belt. ‘What a fight it was every night. And if it was something like spinach, oh my God. I used to turn on the TV and turn off all the lights. You’d sit there watching the TV with your mouths wide open and boom, I’d whack the spinach in.’ Then there was the time Mum surprised Leo on his third birthday by giving him an industrial stapler. According to the label, punching metal into concrete was no longer out of the question. Mum thought we all overreacted; it was at the very least a bit more exciting than getting a birthday card with a £10 note in it. For me, grandparents were a rare but lovely spectacle, like a comet looping the sun in its long orbit. For Daisy and Leo, they are part of the fabric of their lives. And for the grandparents, their grandkids are a reward of another kind. Take Bel’s dad, Garth, for example. Like a devout believer awaiting the fulfilment of a prophecy, Garth has looked in each generation for the emergence of someone—anyone—who might share even a flicker of his love for sport. After four children failed in succession to deliver the goods, a lesser man might have surrendered. Not Garth, who next applied his hope to the possibility of one of his offspring growing up and acquiring a sports-mad partner. Once again, hope was given a hiding—not least by me, who lapsed into blankness at the first mention of rugby. Garth may have been dispirited but, as the saying goes, if you’re going through hell, keep going. It would have to be a grandchild. And lo, he finally hit paydirt. I was coming in from the garden one day when I heard two sounds floating up the hallway: one that was a familiar feature in our house, and one that was not. The first was the sproing-sproing of a nine-year-old trampolining on his parents’ bed. The second was the mellow drone of cricket commentary. I walked into the room and found Leo, fresh from the bath and transfixed by the World Cup as he bounced up and down. To add to the spectacle, he was naked, clutching the pyjamas he’d been sent to put on. He looked at me with a huge smile.

‘It’s great to love sport, Dad,’ he said, then turned his attention back to the cricket. I was still feeling creaky from our session in the park, where he’d run rings around me with a soccer ball—a ball he would later take to bed like a younger child might take a teddy bear. I’ve seen him sleep with his arm draped over it. ‘It is great,’ I said, nodding meaningfully. But Leo’s eyes were welded to the screen and the spectacle of a small white ball being smacked all over a green field. ‘Yes!’ he suddenly cried, his free hand making a fist with which he pumped the air. It was at this point I found myself wondering: where does this boy come from? You see, sport and I are not a thing. We live our lives almost as separately as Gwyneth Paltrow and sense. It’s not that I haven’t tried. As a boy, I played soccer for three years, during which time I scored a grand total of one goal. (I remember the sense of amazement when I found the ball and the open net suddenly before me. It was dutifully mentioned in the club report and, probably sensing that I’d peaked, I coasted through the two remaining years goal-free.) When that flame failed to ignite, other activities were attempted. There was a brief spell of judo, and a slightly longer one of tennis. There was touch footy at school, but I could never get my head past the logic deficit of running forwards but throwing the ball backwards. So on my first attempt, I threw forwards, and immediately got a sense of what it might be like to turn up in church and relieve oneself in the font. Cross-country running was acceptable, but only because it took us into the nearby national park. In any case, it felt like an accelerated bushwalk; why not just bushwalk? And then, encouraged by some Hungarian family friends, I had a stab at fencing. This felt a bit more sensible as it involved masks and swords. And for the school bullies who’d been running a bit short of fresh material lately, it was a welcome boon. But in the end, what killed it all was boredom. Apart from the backward throwing of touch footy, I didn’t find any of it stupid or beneath me: I just didn’t get it. I was utterly immune. Poor Dad knew he was barking up the wrongest of trees, but he persisted, explaining cricket to me as we watched it on the TV. Once, in a fit of wild optimism, he took me to see Australia play Scotland in the rugby union. All I remember of that was a hairy Scottish fan who arrived armed with bagpipes, with which he proceeded to march into the Australian fans, knowing that the pipes’ sonic force field would shield him from their musical critiques. I know Dad felt discouraged, but he hid it well. Most of the time. Now I’m being dragged to sporting events by my son. His own obsession is in full, extravagant flower, and he shares with me his thoughts on the stars of Barcelona FC and why Real Madrid is beneath contempt. He has assessed Chelsea and is encyclopedically across the Socceroos. His Barcelona jersey is as revered as if it were the Shroud of Turin. He keeps a Swans beanie and a Hawthorn beanie in his special drawer for AFL expeditions. And while he’s starting to mull the intricacies of cricket, he’s limbering up—deftly, obsessively—for the soccer season. I’ll soon be on the sidelines. Last year, I surprised myself when I found myself at one of Leo’s games, screaming like an idiot. I daresay I’ll do it again this year. And if I ever wonder how this happened, I’ll tell myself the truth: I inherited it from my son. As for Garth, he walks with a fresh spring in his step, the believer upon whom the gods have bestowed their bounty at last.

PART III

out in the world

14 a home among the gumtree THERE WAS A TIME when Mum’s dedication to smoking was matched only by her dedication to quitting. Every couple of months there was another attempt, each one ending in a rugged carnival of grumpiness and then, at last, a satisfied sigh and a curl of blue smoke. ‘One of these days I’ll give up,’ she’d offer after the eighth cigarette. Why she was so keen to turn her back on them was never really clear to the rest of us. It’s not like she was sold on the scientific evidence. ‘Doctors? What do they know?’ she’d say, adding a short but saltily Hungarian assessment of the medical profession. Her hacking coughs were naught but a coincidence, her shortness of breath just further proof of life’s capacity for random cruelty. And besides, her cigarettes were healthy as she made her own. ‘Mine don’t have the filters with the rotten chemicals,’ she’d reason. Then she’d light up another, even late into the night, her presence reduced to a disembodied voice and an intermittently flaring orange dot on the other side of the flyscreen. A couple of months later, she’d swear off them again. It was a decision she could only arrive at herself. When we were little, Olivia and I tried speeding up the process by liberating her tobacco supply from her handbag and dropping it down the stormwater drain out the front of the house. We were small enough to expect Mum would respond to this demonstration of our love with a shower of gratitude. So it was in some shock a short time later that I found myself down in that drain, extracting the golden Benson & Hedges box from the mass of damp leaves, Mum silhouetted in the square of blue sky above and bellowing her non-appreciation. And then one day she stopped. One smokeless week became two, ballooning into a month, a season, a year. We couldn’t have been more surprised if our goldfish had sprouted a moustache. It lasted three years. Then, either despite or because of the evidence of her improving health, she lit up, smoking like she was going to have every cigarette she’d missed during her abstinence. After her sister had a stroke, my brother and I begged for Mum to quit again. She listened to what we’d experienced in the hospital, but she wasn’t convinced. ‘Doctors,’ she said, then emitted a Hungarian expression that translates as ‘they are shat down’. Puff. If anything, she was smoking even more intensely after she came with me to farewell Dad in the nursing home. She hadn’t seen him in ages. The state of him came as such a shock that she sat down and began massaging his feet. It was her first physical contact with him since the Big Fight. It cut through the dementia and Dad’s eyes shot open with what looked like alarm. He started sitting up in the bed and for a moment it looked like Mum might have startled his ability to walk back into him. Then she disappeared. I found her out the front, lighter in one hand and a cigarette on the go. ‘I’m not finishing up in one of those places,’ she said between drags, and finally a method in her madness seemed to reveal itself. I looked at her and, thinking about what we’d just seen in there, half thought about bumming a smoke. Mum was always going to sell her house the way she was always going to give up smoking. ‘I sell my house and piss off,’ she’d say when, yet again, some element of life had let her down. It wasn’t entirely predictable what might set her off. A squabble with one of her offspring; a fresh power bill; a displeasing run of weather; a possum raid on her tomato plants; a sudden welling of that deep-rooted feeling that the truest solution to all life’s woes is to cast off the trappings of modern settled life and turn nomad once more. Or at least cross the horizon to another neighbourhood that’s home to an Aldi. ‘I call the real-estate agent and—piff-poof—I go from here.’ And, if the latest round had been triggered by heated words with my big sister when she was in residence in Mum’s granny flat, she’d add a clause: ‘And I tell no one where I am.’ Plus a subclause: ‘Fuck everyone.’ So we’d wait as the inevitable played out. Like any ceremonial ritual steeped in time, it was elaborate and oddly mesmerising even though its beginning and end had already been written in stone. And yet the estate agents would come, clinging to that most quietly desperate of beliefs: that hope dies last. Photos would be taken, creative sales pitches written, and a vision hewn from thin air of people falling over themselves to offer cosmic amounts of money for this weatherboard box that shivered through the winter and baked so mercilessly in the summer that whenever I visited I half-expected to feel my buns rising. Then, the first of the complications. In a nutshell: people. After the first open house, Mum’s excitement would already be tinged by something with far deeper roots into her soul: an unwavering, undimmable suspicion of strangers. After the second open house, it had swollen well beyond mere tinge. By the third open house, it had knocked all pretenders aside and taken the throne, from where it proceeded to rule as a tyrant. ‘I don’t like them tramping in and out of my house, looking at my things,’ she moaned. It’s a stance she applied to herself in principled fashion down the track with less than happy results, but more on that later. ‘They’re looking at your house, Mum,’ I’d say. ‘Because they’re thinking about buying it.’ ‘Some of them just want to look at what I’ve got.’ These discussions tended to be finalised from her end with the lighting of a cigarette, something she did in these circumstances with an irritated and well-practised flourish. ‘They are jealous of what I have.’ Then a puff of smoke. Who knows, maybe she’s right and there is a class of person who just likes to traipse through others’ houses, gawping and totting up a mental inventory. Anyone doing that at Mum’s place certainly had their work cut out for them because she had a shit-ton of stuff. Some bits and pieces had travelled with her across the world, or at the very least the Sutherland Shire. Others were just part of life’s stalactitic accumulation process, one given the occasional boost by raiding parties to the nearest St Vinnie’s. ‘Look at this,’ she said one time I rocked up and found the living room swamped by a new white sofa. ‘St Vincent’s. They wanted $200, but I beat them down to 150.’ ‘You haggled with a charity?’ ‘Money is money.’ The first time I’d seen Mum’s bargaining powers in full flight was a special night when Miranda Fair—the Shire’s most massive shopping edifice; imagine the Death Star with a food court—stayed open until midnight. Mum’s nostrils flared at the thought of such a sale, mine flared at the thought of being out so late. ‘Are we going? Are we going?’ I kept pestering her as the hour hand on the kitchen clock passed nine. ‘Not yet. Only the amateurs go this early.’ She talked the way a hunter might, dismissing out of hand the idiots and

dilettantes who would blunder out and startle their prey, or carelessly stand upwind and allow their scent to warn off every animal on the savannah. ‘Let’s have some lemon tea.’ Eventually, coolly, precisely, we set off. We rolled into the carpark where Mum had once scraped the family car and stuck with an awesome steadfastness to her explanation that the concrete pillar had jumped out at her. Then we marched in and I soon understood there was to be No Mucking About. Patrolling the aisles of Harvey Norman like a great white shark visiting a seal colony, Mum instinctively zeroed in on the most exhausted-looking sales assistant and went to work. She already knew what she wanted; she was just finalising the process. And when she got going, there was such a splendid, almost vicious purity of purpose I could only salute. I tried haggling once upon a time and felt so overcome by shame I immediately surrendered and paid the asking price. To do otherwise felt somehow … impolite. As I handed over the money, I momentarily pictured Mum standing nearby, scowling, shaking her head. ‘Why? Why you chuck your money away like this? Such a stupid.’ Mum wasn’t chucking anything away at Miranda Fair that night. Clutching her bulging little bag of cash, she hammered the salesman like the pro she was and soon secured victory. As we lugged away her new TV, I glanced back and saw the salesman. His face reminded me of a war documentary I once saw that featured a scene of weary civilians watching an occupying army pulling out of their village. I can’t for the life of me think if that TV was still going when she started trying to sell her house, but there was plenty of other stuff for any gawpers to feast their eyes on. Every room was stuffed with furniture and appliances and televisions and stereos and mystery massage equipment and books and exercise equipment still in showroom condition and sundry other things, all lying in wait for the careless to trip over or bark their shins on. Somehow Mum had achieved the miracle: she lived alone in a decent-sized house, but made it feel crowded. ‘It’s like a reverse Tardis,’ Laszlo once observed. The next thing that upset the process of selling the house was that people would make offers. They were rarely figures that brought happiness. ‘I am not selling my house for peanuts!’ she would fume after the latest call from the agent, who by then had surely learnt they’d embarked on a different sort of mission. ‘What they offered me is disgusting—they should be ashamed of themselves.’ Typically at this stage, half a cigarette would be quietly sacrificed to the thinking process. Then Mum would reach her conclusion. ‘You know what I tell them? I tell them this.’ Then she’d make the universal rude gesture that utilises the left forearm and right fist. But one of the times she spelled out the insulting figure offered, I couldn’t help but venture the observation that it was precisely how much she’d asked for. Her forearm and fist were pressed into service once more. ‘Guess what,’ she said when I arrived at her house one day. When they came from Mum, these coupled words always made me sit up and listen. It’s not as though there was a smorgasbord of possibilities from which to pick. Real estate, family, cars, food and money were the favoured topics, but the way she worked within them was endlessly rich. As it proved that day. ‘I will sell my house on Gumtree,’ she said with a flourish, then gave this thought a moment to settle into my brain. Mum was aware of the internet the way I was aware of Pluto. Yet here she was embracing it, preparing to flog her house on a website more typically used as a sort of cyber garage sale for shifting TVs and guinea pigs. Even better, her accent meant she pronounced it ‘Gomtree’. ‘You what this means? No real-estate agents. Why I pay them so many thousands of box to do nothing? Why?’ The question struck me as rhetorical, so I didn’t offer any reasons. And she had a point—such was the real-estate fever in Sydney that houses were pretty much selling themselves. ‘Maybe it will take longer this way, but who cares?’ She finished one cigarette and commenced the extermination of the next. ‘I’m not in a hurry. And when it is sold, I am gone from here.’ She swept her arm forcefully across the horizon, indicating the many directions in which she might be piff-poofing. ‘Gone.’ And so her house went online, and Mum began the waiting game. Sure she’d changed the ritual in a pretty fundamental way, but I didn’t see how it was possibly going to pan out differently this time. She sold it. ‘What did I tell you? Gomtree!’ Many years in the making, Mum’s triumphalism was something to behold. ‘The real-estate agents, they are ringing me. “We did not know your house was for sale! Why didn’t you tell us? Who sold it for you?” And you know what I tell them?’ I waited for the traditional gesture—fist, forearm—but it wasn’t coming this time. ‘I tell them, “Gomtree!”’ Mum allowed herself a little chuckle at this victory. ‘It is a big shock for them.’ The smile faltered. ‘But why should I pay them all those thousands of box just so that they do nothing? I keep my money.’ The contract was signed and suddenly Mum had a very real departure date. It was going to be forty years almost to the day since we’d first moved to the Sutherland Shire, and give or take Dad’s and Nagyi’s ashes in the cemetery, it meant an end of our family’s presence in the area. Not that Mum was fussing overly with that sort of sentimentality—she was now dealing with a new challenge: finding somewhere to live. She became fixated on one place north of Sydney, and none of us could quite figure out why. She even found the house she wanted, arguing that it was closer to my brother (but still not actually near), and only a couple of hours away from us. It was a whole lot closer to my big sister, which did at least carry the prospect of their being able to shout at each other in person again. But why she settled on this particular place was the mystery. To borrow from Gertrude Stein, there’s no ‘there’ there. I rang my brother in his capacity as the family’s Mum whisperer, but he didn’t sound like he was any closer to enlightenment. ‘I had a talk with her, and I mentioned there were a couple of problems,’ he said. ‘First up, that it floods sometimes; second, that it’s a shithole. I couldn’t budge her, though.’ So he drove the 500-odd kilometres down from Bellingen and took her a couple of hundred kilometres north again for a detailed tour of the town on which she’d set her heart. Afterwards, Mum delivered her findings: ‘I am not moving there’. Instead, she was going to Bellingen. Courageously, it was to a house she’d never seen in the flesh—no tramping in and out and gawping at someone else’s stuff for her, no siree. Alas, this would backfire when she moved in and almost immediately decided she hated the place and wanted to sell it, but this unhappy denouement was still in the future. For now, we had Mum’s nervous excitement. ‘Gomtree!’ Olivia jetted over from Perth to help Mum with the packing, and Eszter descended from Newcastle. I joined one day to help with chucking out stuff, which is surely the most enjoyable and cathartic part of moving house. Last time I moved with my family, I got a big kick out of driving three uteloads to the local tip and throwing it all into a pit from a great height. Except when I noticed I’d managed to throw in my university testamur—the one skimpy bit of evidence I have of a tertiary education— and had to climb down to retrieve it. At Mum’s, we were just dragging it all out onto the nature strip, where it was to be collected by a council truck. A lot of it was neither here nor there—broken furniture, old pots, carpet tiles—but there was a little treasure waiting for us in the spidery darkness under the house. Wrapped in a gauze of dust and stacked like geological layers was a stash of old ‘for sale’ signs. Olivia and I pulled them into the sunlight and found ourselves face to face with the history of Mum’s attempts at house-selling. There were signs from real-estate companies, one with a font and logo long since superseded. There were signs from Mum’s early attempts at independence. One was a straightforward ‘FOR SALE’ daubed in rough white letters on a brown board.

Another was professionally printed, spelling out the house’s qualities in bullet points then encouraging anyone enticed by the description to contact Mum directly. We stood there, aware we were in the presence of history, and paid it the traditional form of respect: snapping it for posterity on our iPhones. That done, we added the signs to the heap of stuff slowly but surely smothering the nature strip. Mum watched from her traditional spot on the front porch, emitting nicotine puffs. I popped back one more time, driving down the hill near Mum’s street and admiring the view of the nuclear reactor looming bold and white over the sea of eucalypts. Most of her stuff was already inside the removalist truck, so I wandered through the empty house and was blown away by how big it suddenly felt. Everything echoed, and there were little indentations in the carpet that felt like the ghosts of what had been there—piano, wardrobes, sofa. Just before I left, a couple of burly blokes knocked at the door. ‘Morning, we’re from St Vincent de Paul’s. We’re here for the china cabinet.’ I glanced back at where the china cabinet had been. ‘Mum,’ I called. ‘Someone at the door for you.’ ‘The china cabinet?’ she asked as she waddled over from the kitchen. ‘A man picked it up last night. Sorry.’ And that was that, St Vinnie’s defeated once more. I walked out into the backyard one more time and sat on the grass where Daisy had crawled as a baby; where Leo had crawled; where Daisy and I played tip; where Leo and I kicked his soccer ball until it bounced off the granny-flat roof and went over the fence; where Mum’s herd of guinea pigs had roamed and grazed and watched helplessly when the cockatoos raided their food trough; where Mum and I shouted at each other the day I found out she’d set in train the series of events that saw me and Bel accidentally reported to child-welfare services; where Mum and Eszter shouted at each other just to pass the time; where Mum lobbed half-bricks at the red-bellied black snakes that had foolhardily ventured in; where Mum and I had picked our way through family history and she’d dispensed little revelations along the way: ‘No, your father is wrong. You weren’t conceived at home—you were conceived on a dirty weekend up in Budapest. In the Red Star hotel!’ I left Mum surveying the shell that had been her home for nearly a quarter of a century. Then a couple of hours later—piffpoof—she was gone.

15 fists of iron THERE COMES A TIME in any parent’s life when they gaze upon their child—the apple of their eye, the fruit of their loins, the strawberry punnet of their heart—and think, ‘I’d like to kick you out of the car and leave you in a forest with bears’. So when news broke out of Japan that a couple had done just that, I nodded sympathetically. While I’ve not been in a bearrich environment with my kids, I have on two occasions booted my young boy out of the car and driven off—which is a start. Seriously, who has not been tempted? Not as a first resort, of course. The child-forest-bear scenario really ought to be a culmination of a whole lot of events, like those storms where heavy rain coincides with a king tide and a wind blowing in the wrong direction. Or in the case of the Japanese couple, a kid who had been throwing rocks at people and passing cars, reducing their sense of worth as parents to a smouldering heap. Of course, as per tradition, they only kicked him out of the car and drove a short way—enough time for the point to be made —and then went back to get him. This is exactly how I’ve done it with Leo. The first time was in the South Australian outback. To be fair to Leo, we had been in the car a very long time. But to be fair to me, he’d been behaving like such a little … scallywag—yes, that’s the word I’m looking for—that drastic action had to be taken. Sure, there’d been times before when I’d pulled the car over to administer a proper talking-to, but this was the first time I’d given him his marching orders. The silver lining to all this is that I then (in a huff) drove around a corner I wouldn’t have otherwise gone around, and found a service station selling the type of gas-cylinder connector I’d been searching for high and low. This meant we got to have a hot dinner as we camped that night. We toasted Leo’s naughtiness, which was in hindsight probably not an example of world’s-best-practice parenting. The second time was due to some miscreancy after one of his soccer matches. Having ejected him, my wife and I drove off. I will admit that in the heat of the moment, it felt immensely satisfying. We passed a couple of his teammates, their smiles turning to looks of puzzlement as they gazed through the window. ‘Where’s Leo?’ we heard one ask. We didn’t go far—a quick lap around the block, before slowing to a stop beside our beautiful, miffed boy and asking if he’d like a lift. Crucially, Leo was there waiting both times. This is where the Japanese couple’s plan fell down. Heaven knows why their son took off, or how he moved so quickly, but he was as gone as Lord Lucan. As the story spread, descriptions of the woods he’d disappeared into began to circulate, including the expression ‘bear-infested’—which to my ears takes these huge, furry apex predators and puts them on the same rung as silverfish. What was striking was just how angry lots of people were, some going as far as calling for the parents’ arrest. You’d have thought in this day and age that they would at least have got some credit for not smacking their kid. (Even in my childhood, when corporal punishment was still in vogue, it wasn’t a feature of my home life. Only once do I remember Dad smacking me. I also remember richly deserving it. He did give a cheeky mate of mine a bit of a clip behind the ears. This seemed fairly unremarkable then; these days you’d build an entire novel around it. Mum, on the other hand, didn’t smack even once, but instead channelled her rage into inanimate objects. She had a particular soft spot for the wooden spoon— or fakanál, as it is amusingly called in Hungarian—which she’d wave around while loudly and bluntly assessing our shortcomings. There was a time she got so cheesed off that she drop-kicked a telephone at me. Not a mobile, but a landline phone that had a bit of mass to it. It sailed through the air, the receiver following at a polite distance at the end of its cord, and missed. It was a bit of a shock, but everything was made worthwhile by her vociferous complaints afterwards. ‘Now my phone is not working because of [colourful Hungarian intensifier] you!’ How her growling compared to forest-infesting bears I don’t know.) Mercifully, the Japanese boy was found safe and sound, and I decided it might be time to evolve my disciplinary tactics. Should the need ever arise again, I stand bound to find a way to evict Leo from the car but keep him with us. We do have roof racks … The flipside to discipline is the freedom we allow. A little while back, I got fixated on a map of Yorkshire, which showed how radically the scope of one Sheffield family’s children’s right to roam had shrunk over four generations. The great-grandfather had, at the age of eight, been allowed to walk just under 10 kilometres unsupervised to go fishing in the Rother Valley— incidentally, just a shade over 15 kilometres from where Dad grew up. Perhaps it was a very lax generation—the grandfather was allowed to walk only 1.6 kilometres, which got him as far as the woods. The mother scored but half that distance, and the son less than half—which got him no further than the end of the street. It’s a battle running uphill all the way. And if it’s not one you’re willing to fight yourself, don’t worry—there are plenty of others willing to take up cudgels on your behalf. The first time my kids were allowed to go by themselves to a nearby playground, it was a big adventure on little legs that lasted the short time it took a couple of ‘concerned parents’ to herd them back to our front door. As Bel and I lifted our negligent parental gaze to take in our sedate neighbourhood—labradors, Subarus, renovation, angst about private schools—we realised we were in the presence of adults far more attuned to hidden dangers. But not as attuned as the two women who struck when Bel took Daisy to the beach. It was one we visit a lot during the holidays and it was almost post-apocalyptically empty. Daisy, then aged six, was set up with a bucket and spade with which she happily got to work while Bel jumped into the modest surf a few metres away. I’d always imagined the women first appeared as two specks in the distance, slowly but surely growing into human silhouettes as they approached across the sand—like Omar Sharif’s legendary entrance in Lawrence of Arabia, but without the gunshot. No, it was just two women who’d materialised next to the bemused Daisy, profoundly put out that Bel had strayed more than an umbilical cord’s length from her precious angel. One hung back in a cloud of judgment, while the other went to work on Bel, demanding: ‘Don’t you realise that there are pedophiles in the bushes?’ We walked through those bushes a lot on our way to the beach, but we’d never seen anything other than blue-tongue lizards and the odd wallaby, and none of them seemed that interested in the kids. The woman pressed her point. ‘There is a jail near here!’ ‘Where?’ ‘Grafton!’ ‘That’s 80 kilometres away.’ ‘Exactly!’ Bel still gets the giggles telling the story. But the terrifying world those women had built around themselves wasn’t such a rare one. As I was reminded when my father-in-law was bailed up by swimming-pool attendants for photographing his own grandchildren, it sometimes feels like we’re all suspected as potential pedos now. I don’t remember it being like that growing up. It’s not that our parents didn’t have fears; they just seemed a bit less, well,

fantasy-based. One of Dad’s big rules was that we never rode our bicycles out of our little cul-de-sac ‘without proper adult supervision’; he was very fond of the phrase and it always unfurled from his mouth like a musty old legal parchment. We could walk as far as we wanted but no pedalling. Naturally, my sister and I would respond to this by sneaking out on our BMX knock-offs for the illicit thrill of hurtling along the next street, and sometimes even the one after. The prospect of getting sprung by Dad—and it would have been quite the Old Testament production—just made every metre we rode feel like a kilometre. But he wasn’t worried about us being kidnapped by molesters, more that we’d be mown down by some lunatic motorist. Given that we lived in a quiet suburb next to the bush, this seemed almost aspirational. Paradoxically, Dad shelved all car-related fears the time our trusty Kingswood broke down on a dirt road in the bush. He flagged down a passing ute, chucked me on the back among the tools, and waved me off with two perfect strangers, reminding me to come back with help. It was probably the setting that made the difference. For Dad, the bush was a place of safety and beauty, a flower- and birdfilled sanctuary from everything that gave him the squirts about the world. Most importantly, it was a place in which to sit on a big chunk of sandstone with the dogs and watch cockatoos flying in noisy procession through the valley below. So while our cycling was corseted in rules, the bush wasn’t. It was a wonderland that started at the end of our street and in the exploration of which we had totally free rein. ‘Just get back before it’s dark,’ was the regular parental order. The bush was both wild and familiar, a place of beauty and easy make-believe, and we ran into it as fast as our legs could carry us. We never knew the expression ‘helicopter parents’. As a small postscript, it should be said that Daisy and Leo did once get close to seeing a helicopter because of their parents. Proving that quality wins out over quantity, Bel and the kids got lost at Manly Dam, one of Sydney’s most petite pockets of bushland. The light was fading and I’d run ahead to shift the car out of the carpark before the boom gate got locked as the sign there sternly warned. The short lesson looking back on the whole debacle is that it is better to stick together and stump up the $50 fine for getting the gate unlocked, rather than go through what we did. Which was for Bel to panic and call the police, who —judging by the sheer numbers that turned up—had been having an immensely quiet Sunday. As I found Bel and the kids, the other side of the lake erupted with torches and headlights. Two officers emerged out of the dark and with much jollity led us back. Waiting on the dam wall were lots more police. On the other side, the number of uniforms in the carpark made the number on the dam look modest. And more were arriving. Eventually, one ambled over with a book in her hands. ‘We’ll need some ID and details from one of you,’ she said, impeccably poker-faced. ‘For our records.’ Bel patted her pockets. ‘Mine’s in the car,’ she said brightly. It was with some sadness I took the officer’s pen and entered my name in the Book of Moron. The police chopper, which had been ready to lift off from its pad with its searchlights, was told to stand down.

16 inflammable material IN AN IDEAL WORLD, you’d sip your first martini in Manhattan, hear your first Strauss in Vienna, puff your first cigar in Cuba, see your first sumo match in Japan. So it was in this spirit that I attended my first flag-burning in Iran. It was a wiltingly hot day in the desert city of Yazd in the summer of 2014, and the thought of doing anything that would heat the air any further seemed a touch counterintuitive. But the crowd, it had to be said, was animated by a certain fervour. It was the last Friday of Ramadan, which in Iran is marked as Quds Day (after the Arabic name for Jerusalem), a day of government-sponsored solidarity with the Palestinians. A crowd had been swelling through the morning, armed with a riot of gaily coloured placards adorned with bilingual messages ranging from the tersely brief—‘Down with USA’ and ‘Israel must be obliterated’—to the haphazardly ambitious: ‘America Israel, nobody picks the flower with kick’. Give or take some of the images of Khomeini glowering gigantically from the sides of buildings in Tehran, it was my family’s first experience of hostility in Iran. But it seemed confined to the placards, the people being as friendly as they’d been everywhere else. ‘Hello, my friend, where are you from?’ they asked as I weaved through the crowd to the heart of the action. It was a common enough question there, a country where Western tourists are still such a novelty they get cheerily mobbed as they walk down the street. But as a pair of flags—one Israeli, one US—was carefully prepared for immolation before us, the question bore a bit more weight. ‘Deutsch?’ one man asked, a hopeful smile beneath his moustache. ‘Australian,’ I answered, enunciating the syllables with particular care. Not that I needed to worry; the BBC’s John Simpson describes wading into an anti-Britain jamboree, announcing himself as a Brit, and being welcomed so heartily that the ‘Death to Thatcher’ chant-leader seized his hand and kissed it. Such is the Persian relationship with hospitality. It didn’t go quite that far for me, but my answer pleased my interrogator. ‘Australia,’ he repeated enthusiastically to the throng around us, which resulted in a ripple of smiles. He turned back to me. ‘Would you like to get up on the truck?’ Across the sea of heads—past the placards and banners, the turbans of mullahs, the stiffly swishing black chadors, the khakiclad kids waving toy machine guns from their fathers’ shoulders—stood a flatbed truck crowded with photographers. It seemed there was room for one more. I was helped up, frying my palms on the hot metal in the process. On the edge of the crowd, I could see two small faces staring up at me in a sudden paralysis of consternation—Leo and Daisy, convinced something small but vital in Daddy’s brain had finally popped. Below me, as the crowd got louder, there was little doubt about who was to blame for the Palestinians’ suffering. Just behind me, the portly, unshaven chant-caller stabbed the air with his fingers and bellowed into his microphone, ‘Marg bar Amrika!’ Death to America. And no, Israel wasn’t neglected. As smoke and eventually flames billowed from the Stars and Stripes and the Star of David, the crowd answered in kind, pumping their fists. I thought for a moment about how this sat with the apparent popularity in Iran of Coca-Cola and, for some reason, SpongeBob SquarePants. The chant went on. I don’t speak Farsi, but I deduced that Israel was coming in for a profound kicking. Two Benjamin Netanyahu effigies swung in the hot breeze for good measure. I began to suspect that constructive criticism of Hamas wasn’t going to be part of the day’s program. All in all, it was the sort of scene I normally associated with those small parts of the SBS schedule not given over to boobs, soccer and Nazis. But then a young man in pogo boots started springing over the smouldering heap while others did victory laps on rollerblades, lending the whole affair more than a touch of the ridiculous. On the edge of the crowd, meanwhile, one of the locals explained to Bel that many of the ‘protesters’ were soldiers from the nearby barracks, clad in plain clothes and bussed in for the day. ‘We don’t agree with this, but we have no choice,’ he said apolo getically. In the end, a fireman turned his hose on the flag pyre and the crowd—half-baked in the heat—finally looked happy as the cool spray fell on them. Buses arrived and filled with young men, who waved and called ‘Salaam!’ to us as they left. The government-sponsored protest dissolved, and things returned to normal. Shortly afterwards, a local invited us home for a cup of tea.

17 log off, delete your account IT WAS SOMEWHERE BETWEEN my 467th glance at Facebook and a chuckle over something dumb on Twitter that the penny dropped. I had to step out of the internet. It wasn’t an easy decision. The web’s constant flood of tasty distractions is as hard to turn away from as a vending machine giving away its Mars bars. But something had to be done; when it comes to letting my attention wander, I am my own worst enemy. In the end, I made it wander out the back door and to the end of the garden and the realisation that, as it is with so many questions, the answer lay in the shed. The first step in creating a WiFi-free writing spot for myself entailed a trip to Ikea. The less said about that excursion—hell, but with the nine circles rearranged into something less user-friendly—the better. But the upshot of it was a desk slender enough to fit into the shed, most of which is already taken up with snakes. This is not a metaphor. Like the time it dawned that conspiracy enthusiast David Icke’s theory that the world was run by lizards was not coded anti-Semitism but in fact a theory that the world was run by lizards—sometimes a reptile is just a reptile. The serpents in question are pets: a woma called George, a Darwin carpet python named in honour of Kinky Friedman, and a black-headed python named Buttercup, courtesy of a soft spot for The Princess Bride. (Part of the idea was that a name like Buttercup would help soften the blow when Bel figured out how big black-headed pythons get; this belief proved misguided. The moment of truth came at the birthday of a friend’s child, where the star was a reptile guy who came along with lizards, snakes, a crocodile, a guitar and, as luck would have it, a black-headed python long enough for nearly all of the children at the party to hold at the same time. The tone of Bel’s voice was a mix of trepidation and the Book of Revelation: ‘What type of snake did you say Buttercup was?’ The conversation that followed was not a great success. But I digress.) The shed was erected just before we moved into our house. Thanks to a fluke of arrangements, the snakes in the shed had electricity before the house did. The way Bel keeps bringing this up nearly four years later suggests she is still processing it and not entirely ready to let go of the idea that, when it comes to priorities, I am a monster. That said, it was nice in those early days to be able to head up to the warmth of the shed when it was still cold and dark in the house. I’m still not sure why it took so long for me to come around to the idea of this special happy place of mine being the answer to that final challenge. A friend pointed out apps that allow you to shut down the internet on your iPad. Another directed me to the more straightforward example of Jonathan Franzen, who superglued shut the ethernet port on his computer. But I’ve already grown fond of my method: stepping out the back door, climbing the steps cut wonkily out of the sandstone, and walking the couple of metres to the shed. And it’s only here as I sit down in my chamber of serpents that the final bar of WiFi dies, taking with it all the email and Twitter alerts that plague the top of my iPad screen, dispatching them in a job lot with every other cyber temptation. As for the snakes themselves, they are beautiful in their silence, perfect as writing companions. In the dim glow from the iPad screen and infrared globe, I can see George gliding over his log, and Kinky gazing down from a high bamboo perch with the occasional flicker of tongue. Buttercup, for her part, has retreated to her cave to sleep off a rat almost the size of a corgi. Through the shed window, Mars is shining down through the branches of the silky oak. The last of the family serpents— Henrietta the diamond python—is draped across her branch in her outdoor enclosure, her dotted skin adding an extra constellation to the night. And, inside, I’m tap-tap-tapping, freed from the outside world at last. Once in a while, I sit down with Leo and Daisy and talk with them about what the world was like before the internet. Sometimes I trowel it on a bit, and focus on times such as when I was a student in St Petersburg in the early 1990s. I tell them about how it was still possible to send a telegram (‘A what, Dad?’), but if you wanted to make an international phone call, you had to go to the post office and book one, then wait for a long time before you got, hopefully, to make it. For added value, I tell them about the multi-hour ordeal of getting a call through to Dad, only for him to announce part way through that there was something he’d seen in the paper he wanted to share with me and, ignoring my panicky protestations, put the receiver down next to the telephone. Humming to himself, he went off looking for it. My allotted call time expired while he was still happily rifling through his pile of newspapers. I rested my forehead against the glass of the booth for a moment and swore. As I came out, a mournfullooking Armenian glanced up at me and simply asked, ‘Family?’ Dad may have been a menace on the phone, but he more than made up for it with his letters. Even more than the phone-call rigmarole, it was the correspondence that sounded most otherworldly to my kids. I tell them about how I’d spend long evenings at my desk, pouring myself on to sheets of paper, looking up now and then to gaze across my little corner of the Gulf of Finland. Often they were letters to individuals, sometimes they were group letters designed to be passed around a group of friends. Then I’d send them off and wait. Thanks to the vagaries of the Russian postal service, I’d hear nothing for a fortnight, maybe three weeks. Then, like a blockage in a pipeline clearing at last, a bundle of letters would suddenly lob. ‘My Lord,’ my host mother commented after one delivery. ‘And I thought Russians were fond of writing.’ I’d cloister myself with a cup of tea and start ripping open those envelopes. Sometimes there’d be a little something inside to remind me of home—more than a couple of gum leaves made it to me pressed between the lined pages—but it was the bits in ink that counted the most. Perhaps it was because of the effort that went into it—the paper, the pen, the envelope, the licking of that not-entirely-unpleasant border of gum, the trip to the post office and the careful positioning of stamps—that made each letter feel like such an event. However many letters arrived, though, one thing was certain: the envelope from Dad would be the biggest. Swollen with newspaper clippings and great appendices of afterthoughts, it was like being sent a paper pillow. And in each one, Dad always insisted that our dog—a creature with a heart of gold and a brain of helium—sent his fondest regards. The sentimentality around snail mail, though, is something of a broad church. At the risk of sounding like a sentimental old fart, for example, I miss old-fashioned hate mail. We’re talking about envelopes that all but gave off a poisonous green vapour as they lay in my pigeonhole, waiting to disgorge their payloads. Sometimes it would just be a clipping of something I’d written, the offending line angrily circled and a blunt message scrawled for my benefit—or, more likely, the pointed opposite—in the margin. But even more treasured than those were missives from people who’d gone to the trouble of actually writing me a note, even a proper letter, to explain with varying degrees of patience why I was a dickhead. Sometimes it looked like the ink hadn’t so much flowed from the pen as been stabbed into the paper—the correspondence equivalent of tattooing. But then there’d be the ones written in a hand that remained elegant even as it endeavoured to tear me

a new one. That combination of beauty and venom has appealed to me ever since I saw my first blue-ringed octopus. At one end of the spectrum, there’d be ones calling into question my parentage or my intelligence. At the other, you’d have ones expressing the fond hope my life span would fall far short of the average. The middle ground was occupied by those who’d invite me to engage in an intimate physical activity traditionally regarded as needing a minimum of two people—and yet, showing a faith in my abilities that was frankly at odds with the rest of these letters, they were confident I could go it alone. While I sometimes scratched my head at what could have provoked such burst sewerage pipes of emotion, I appreciated the effort. These people had put pen to paper, folded it carefully, popped it in an envelope, addressed it correctly (give or take some creative amendments to my name) and gone to the post office. Sometimes they’d be anonymous, but often they’d sign their name, even give their address. I couldn’t resist writing to some of them, and a couple of times this had a disarming effect. Not always, though, and I’d find my pigeonhole evil with the presence of an even rougher letter. It’s a lot easier now with email, which has robbed the process of some of its fun. And it’s dangerously simple to dash off a line when you’ve got out of the wrong side of bed. Twitter takes even less effort, ditto an online comment. For a short while (before I decided it was perhaps unhealthy), I collected the more amusingly pungent emails in a folder labelled ‘non-fan mail’. This cracker, sent to the Strewth inbox while a colleague was filling in for me, is by far the cleanest: ‘Why can’t we have you every day? It’s so lovely reading your Strewth, instead of that filthy rubbish James Jeffrey. Uneducated idiot. Here’s hoping he never comes back. Please show him this email. Happy Australia Day.’ (Here’s to you, ‘Josh’, wherever you are.) The persistent ones are more of a mystery. Why spend so much energy on something that you don’t like but is minor in the scheme of things? Imagine the same mentality down at the takeaway: ‘Can I help you?’ ‘I don’t like the look of that sausage roll.’ ‘Sorry to hear that.’ ‘That sausage roll disgusts me.’ ‘You don’t have to eat it, sir.’ ‘That sausage roll is an outrage!’ ‘Can I interest you in a hamburger?’ ‘THAT SAUSAGE ROLL MAKES ME SICK JUST LOOKING AT IT.’ ‘Er, sandwich?’ The anonymous tweets represent the worst drop in standards since envelopes were abandoned, being as they are the internet equivalent of some idiot yelling a rude word from a passing car. Though at least with the idiots in cars, there is the faint but cheering possibility they’ll hit a telegraph pole. There are upsides, though: the abusers play the vital role of counter acting the ego-bloating effects of fan mail. All I ask is that they try to be original with their abuse. Even those who aren’t exactly in the pocket of Big Imagination should give it a whirl. We choose to do these things, as John F. Kennedy said, ‘not because they are easy, but because they are hard’. If that’s too much, get another hobby. As they demonstrate their resistance to the whole letter-writing thing, I sometimes find myself wondering about the resilience of kids today. Then I remember Leo in hospital after he fell off his bike and broke his arm so comprehensively it looked like he was packing two elbows in one limb. As I raced from the office to the hospital I was convinced I was going to find a wan, miserable boy. Not so. ‘Dad!’ he called when he spotted me. ‘I got to ride in an ambulance!’ Sitting by his bed was Daisy, who promptly performed one of her magnificent eyerolls. (If confronted, she always insists she isn’t rolling them, just looking at the ceiling, looking at the floor, then looking at the ceiling again.) ‘I can’t believe they used the siren,’ she said archly. ‘He’s only broken a bone.’ Leo was not to be deterred from his path of complete excitement. ‘I hope I have another ride!’ ‘Please don’t break your other arm, darling,’ I said, doing my best to make my urgent plea sound casual. He looked thoughtful, then brightened. ‘I know—Daisy can break her arm!’ There was another time when Leo gave himself a suspected hairline fracture just before we set off on a road trip. A couple of days into it, Daisy sprained her wrist and scored herself a sling as well. As we travelled for the next couple of weeks, we noticed people looking at us askance, and no wonder; we looked like a photograph from a child-abuse catalogue. So, yes. I don’t feel as though I need to fret too much about resilience. But there is something to be said about the importance of not taking every comment to heart. I really must be setting a more solid example on this front. In fact, there’s a slight chance I may have cracked it once more in print. It went rather a lot like this. As I write my columns in this corner of The Australian—about family, about hangovers, about life and death and the nicotineand-anger adventures of my mother—there’s one thing that happens almost like clockwork. A commenter will saunter into the space underneath and pose the question, ‘And this passes for journalism?’ The same goes for my parliamentary sketches, vignettes from the Canberra circus that hopefully offer some amusement and with any luck, or at least by accident, a little insight amid the lashings of metaphor and Christopher Pyne. ‘And this passes for journalism?’ It just lies there, gently steaming. What are you meant to do with it? It’s not as if it’s really meant as a question. Same goes for its close cousin: ‘Your point is?’ It’s often left at that, the equivalent of tagging a wall with a spray can, a squiggle that never aspires to the effort or imagination of actual graffiti. Having made themselves heard, they don’t stick around to listen. They drop their line and they’re gone. ‘And this passes for journalism?’ Try to imagine the action unfurling in a pub. There you are sharing a bit of a yarn, then chatting about it afterwards with fellow drinkers when someone sticks their head into the circle, glares over their schooner and demands, ‘And your point is?’, then without so much as another word, wanders away, possibly to pass judgment on the pokies, or maybe chew on a beer coaster. I’ve spent a lot of time pondering the value of comments sections. The concept is to open a conversation between writers and readers, which is a beautiful ideal. But like any ideal, it’s complicated the moment you add the human factor. A lot of commenters are terrific, thoughtful and constructive, adding greatly to the value of the original piece. But let’s face it, a lot of people aren’t around for that. They come to have their prejudices confirmed, and don’t take it well when those prejudices are challenged. Watch in very little wonder as yet another comments section becomes a jamboree of graceless sledging, brawls and flame fights, people freed from the civilising effect of face-to-face contact and ready to flip off the safety catch on their keyboards and go all out. And these fights can take on a life of their own, going on and on among the warring commenters as the original piece recedes into the past like some ancient Balkan slight. While you can vaguely admire their sheer feral energy, there’s a good reason ‘Never read the comments’ has become one of the more urgent refrains of our time.

One columnist at Another Newspaper who used to spend a lot of energy comparing Twitter to a sewer (and not in a good way) seemed untroubled by the fact that his words were often parked over a comments section that was like a septic tank (also not in a good way). But sometimes, a greater thing can emerge, namely, actual conversation, discussion that takes the seed of the original article and grows. People sharing their experiences, or challenging the writer in interesting ways. I’ve had some delightful surprises along the way, even moments of poignancy and joy. There’ve been readers who’ve made me laugh, and ones who’ve made me realise the error of my ways and left me thinking for days afterwards. I cross my fingers and hope that, ultimately, my readers have made me a better writer. But even when the going’s good, along will come that one-note wonder. ‘And this passes for journalism?’ For some, I suspect it stems from the disappointment that the paper isn’t, say, wall-to-wall Paul Kelly—an understandable disappointment. But Kelly isn’t stingy with his words and there’s plenty to go around. Following my latest ‘And this passes for journalism?’, I’ll confess to feeling a bit fed up. I thanked my commenter for checking in, but suggested such a comment was a bit like going to a cake shop and getting grumpy because you can’t get a steak. I’m still in love with the idea of a newspaper being a banquet with plenty of courses. Hard news, breaking news, solid analysis—all of that is important. But they’re not the only reason readers turn up. So, for those of you poised to ask me what my point is—apart from vive la différence—it’s a straightforward one: this article passes for journalism. That said, you could just make like Tony Jones and take this as a comment. Since the article above was published, I have been reminded of the value of an earthier approach. It was advice from Carrie Fisher to John Boyega, one of her young co-stars in the Star Wars reboot, who was copping a bit of grief on the internet. It was a lot more full-on than the wares served up by the ‘And this passes for journalism’ merchants. More specifically, it was emanating from battalions of man-babies who were cool with the possibility of the baddies sucking stars into a hollowed-out planet for the purpose of blowing up other planets, but freaked out at the thought of a black man in a Stormtrooper outfit. Fisher’s advice was as timeless as it was brief: ‘Ah, boohoo, who fuckin’ cares? You just do you.’

18 more beer, vicar? THE ONE TIME I passed out drunk in the great outdoors was in England on a visit to my aunt and grandmother. I’m not saying that boozing there is any more fraught than other places, but it has followed a certain theme. One night in my early twenties, in a bid to feel more connected to the land of my birth, I necked a couple of beers, lay down in the middle of a field with my Walkman and listened to Dark Side of the Moon while staring up at the couple of stars on show. A few songs in, I stretched my arms and nudged something with my left elbow. It was at this point—mellowed half senseless by ale and Pink Floyd—that I learnt about the existence of digger wasps. My left elbow prickled oddly, then felt like it was bursting into flames. The mood of the evening never recovered after that. The night of my passing-out—in my even earlier twenties—involved another species of British wildlife. I’d been out with some of the other yoof I’d been ushered towards in Nagyi and Liz’s street. Eventually, we’d gone to a pub, where it was loud and—as tended to happen to me from time to time in those days—I could feel shyness and a vague haze of depression laying claim to my tongue. ‘Mate,’ one of the lads had told me brightly early in the evening, ‘the birds here are going to love your accent.’ Not if I can’t speak, I thought. The solution was clearly another pint. When that didn’t work, I did what any self-respecting self-diagnoser would do and upped the dose. I was both generous apothecary and enthusiastic patient, chugging away until I realised I was no longer just shy and down: I was now shy, down and shit-faced. Even if the first two magically evaporated, I was very much stuck with the third. Looking around at all these faces I barely knew, locked in conversations about people I knew even less, I quietly shifted away into the throng, pushing my way through until I reached the door and the drizzly freedom beyond. The joys of ghosting can be fleeting, but there are times you grab even a few seconds of relief. For those minutes when a small, giddy elation outweighed the coming sadness, I made my way through the tangle of streets, past the lolly factory that regularly blanketed the town with its cloying aromas, past the canal that filled on weekends with the water-channel equivalent of trainspotters, and started up the hill towards that house where my family had taken it in turns to cuddle the baby me in front of the camera and where my grandmother had told my mum not to bother speaking Hungarian to us. ‘You’re in England now.’ The rain started to pick up as I went, the cool fuzz of drizzle giving way to something more insistent. The next thing I knew I was huddled under a little bridge, stupidly drunk and oscillating between a horrible moroseness and relief at being out of the rain and out of the company of human beings. And shortly after that, I was out of it altogether. How long was I unconscious? These days there’s probably something like Fitbit that measures the length of your drunken stupor. Another handy measurement would be letting you know how far you’ve walked with your half-baked weaving all over the place, as opposed to the considerably shorter distance if you’d taken the same route sober. I gather there are already phones that warn you when you appear to be drunk-texting, which is probably a good idea but nevertheless strikes me as hampering the growth of one of our species’ most rapidly and richly growing forms of communication. But I digress. I can’t have been conked out hugely long, a couple of hours maybe, but the world seemed somehow quieter when I came to. As I opened my eyes, the first thing I noticed was that the rain had stopped. The second thing I noticed was a toad—a sort of greenish beige and as big as my fist—sitting barely more than arm’s length from my face, its throat gently throbbing. If you’re in an anthropomorphising frame of mind, one of the things toads give off is a supreme air of self-sufficiency. Compare that to the enchantingly gormless air of frogs—smooth-skinned, a mouth set in what looks a permanent, hopeful smile; but toads look like they really couldn’t give a toss. And as I stared into this one’s eyes, I got the giggles. The toad rather pointedly turned its back on me, which made me giggle harder. As I finally dragged myself to my feet and set off for home, hiccuping into the Derbyshire night, I wondered whether Dad had ever kipped under the same bridge. And then I thought: Not bloody likely. Dad and the legend of his alcohol prowess was one of the great shrinking giants of my childhood. It’s not as though he set out to paint himself as a total boozehound, nor did he dispense sottish aphorisms à la Dean Martin (‘A man isn’t truly drunk if he can lie on the floor without holding on’). But he did get a special kick out of painting his student days as a semi-genteel bacchanalia. Many of his stories would allude to the beginning of festivities, then tail off with an ‘And, oh … good grief!’ and a hearty chuckle at the memory of those devil-may-care days. Perhaps I should have paid more attention to the poverty of detail in these stories, but it’s not like I felt I was in any position to point the finger on après-drink blurriness. When I first saw photos of him at Nottingham University, it had to be said he and his mates did have a touch of old-world reprobates about them. Reclining in blazers, puffing pipes, they looked more than capable of chucking down a train of pints (with a couple of brandies playing the role of caboose), then gallivanting through town on penny-farthings, stealing policemen’s hats, crashing into hedgerows and generally being tipsy scamps. ‘Your Dad? Tipsy?’ Arthur, one of Dad’s friends from his youth, looked hugely tickled by the idea the first time I visited him. He opened a can of beer and handed it to me, then opened one for himself. He’d pulled one from behind a sofa, another from under the stairs. ‘My son-in-law’s getting craftier at finding them, ergo I’m getting craftier at hiding them from him,’ he’d explained, clearly enjoying the escalation. ‘He’s a thirsty bugger.’ We knocked cans together, Arthur took a hearty sip then levelled his twinkling eyes at me. ‘Do you know what we called your Dad, Jim?’ I had no idea. Arthur lowered his can in order to accord the fullest gravity to the moment. ‘We called him the vicar.’ The surprised smile on my face stirred Arthur on to greater excitement. As Liz chuckled her encouragement, Arthur laid down story upon story of Dad’s almost-abstemious ways, his tut-tutting of the others for their waywardness, his regular and evidently entirely unsolicited reminders to them of the rules. The way Arthur told it, Dad had spent a good chunk of his time carrying on like a sentient wet blanket. It was something that would manifest itself in odd ways late in his life. Once, when we were admiring some rock art out in the arid stretches of western New South Wales, he starting getting irritable, tapping at his watch. ‘We should get going.’ ‘What’s the hurry?’ I asked. ‘Don’t forget the rules.’ I looked around me, the horizon vast and the sky empty except for a solitary buzzard. ‘What rules?’ This just irritated him into tapping his watch harder. I was so sure that this had come later in life, but Arthur explained this was not the case. ‘That’s your Dad for you,’ Liz remarked dryly.

‘A bloody good fella, no two ways about it,’ said Arthur. ‘But a complete vicar.’ I suddenly wondered back at those times when he’d indulged my transgressions and slips with little more than a smile. Such as the time he returned to our house and the inglorious ruins of my eighteenth-birthday party, only to be informed by one of my still-intact friends that the birthday boy had been one of the casualties. ‘He was very tired,’ one explained. I felt almost blessed. And repeatedly forgiven. When I got my driver’s licence, there’d be times when Dad would lay on a bender for himself, which might consist of a solitary long-neck. Occasionally, he’d take off the handbrake, go hog-wild and aim for two. ‘Would you mind driving me to the pub to get a beer? I’d drive myself, but I’m afraid I’ve already had a bottle, bonny lad.’ A bottle. Amusingly, one of those booze runs to the neighbouring suburb involved me forgetting to put the P-plates on Dad’s Kingswood. Naturally, I got pulled over by the police. ‘It’s my fault, officer,’ Dad said, repeatedly talking over me as I tried to answer the copper’s questions. ‘I’m talking to the driver, sir,’ one of them eventually said, packing such a density of tetchiness into the ‘sir’, it was the verbal equivalent of a neutron star. The cop looked back at me and said a fine would be sent in the post. I had no idea this was code for being let off with a warning and that no fine would ever materialise in the letterbox. But this disrupted Dad’s sense of order and he made me drive to the police station where, with the top of his singlet protruding rakishly above his shirt, he demanded to know why no fine had been issued on the spot, as was the norm in this day and age. As he dragged us closer to the edge of danger, questioning the professionalism of today’s police force, the duty officer gave me a look and shooed us away. We forgot Dad’s longneck. Funnily enough, what proved to be the final coherent conversation I ever had with Dad saw us split a sixpack. As we sipped our way through, I would have loved one more tale of youthful folly from him, however embellished, but by then all that was way too far behind him. Mum is the flipside of the coin. ‘I hardly ever drink,’ she’s always insisted. ‘It goes straight to my head.’ And yet of my two parents, she’s the only one I’ve seen blotto. And Lord did she do it in style. It was on the day of Eszter’s wedding and, truth be told, Mum was ripped before we even got there. It wasn’t her fault, really. Well, not entirely. I mean who, when faced with an hour-long ride in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce in which one of your travelling companions is a chilled bottle of champagne, is at the very least, not going to slightly misplace their usual sensibilities? I was fifteen and wearing a bow tie and cummerbund for the first time in my life. I felt so dapper, but when I saw a photo recently, I laughed for the best part of half an hour. My little sister, Olivia, was done up beautifully, the foundation applied to her face doing its best to soften the outline of a zit the size of Flinders Island. Not to worry—it turned she had a plan for that. Mum, for her part, was almost excited enough to levitate. You might have thought that after having so many weddings herself, the spectacle could have worn a bit thin. Maybe it was the novelty of seeing someone else tie the knot. Maybe it was that her eldest child getting hitched constituted a crucial step in her plan to amass an entire platoon of grandchildren. Or maybe she was just up for a bit of boogieing and, in her exalted status as Mother of the Bride, a bit of good old-fashioned flirting. ‘You are good-looking and you have so much money,’ I remember her telling one distinguished-looking gentleman that day. He was the father of the bridegroom, and he took it in his stride. His wife, slightly less so. Whatever the precise recipe behind her excitement, there was no denying she was pumped. And that was even before she hit the champagne. ‘Just a little bit more. We only live once,’ was a regular refrain from her end of the posh upholstery. And the bottle would glug-glugglug its song. Bubble by bubble, we slowly made our way to the Sydney Opera House, where we were to board the boat that was to host Eszter’s wedding. Mum tumbled out of the Roller, made some exuberant noises, then started to lurch around the place a bit. Looking back, I think of HG Wells’s description in The War of the Worlds of the first Martian emerging from its cylinder, clumsily struggling in Earth’s stronger gravity. And so it was for Mum as she left planet Rolls-Royce and set foot in the world of the unchampagned. That said, she was a whole lot jollier about it than the Martians. And anyone looking at her as she made her way to the little wharf would have likely concluded that she had simply taken the very sensible precaution of acquiring her sea legs before boarding. The rest of my memories from that day are mainly fragments. Eszter’s gigantic smile, the dropped wedding cake, the coterie of fellow Hungarian divorcees Mum had invited along huddled by the wheelhouse in the evening to hear the captain relay results from that day’s state election. The long-serving Labor government had been felled, and that sparked a deep and obvious pleasure. ‘They’ve kicked out the communists,’ one called out, and there was whooping. To make things even better, the new premier of New South Wales was Hungarian-born. So happy was this event that their air of ambient bitterness softened. Oddly enough, a small corner of my memory is reserved for Olivia emerging from the bathroom with a look of immense satisfaction. It took me a moment to register that Flinders Island was gone from the map of her chin. ‘I squeezed it,’ she said when she saw the look on my face. ‘How did you go?’ ‘It hit the mirror.’ She was so happy with this it was clear that anything good that happened this day from this point on was just a bonus. But more than any of this, I remember Mum getting sluiced in the Rolls-Royce. It was a Halley’s comet moment, a cosmic spectacle that I’ll be unlikely ever again to witness.

19 with this ring BEL, IT HAS TO be said, was not immediately keen on the idea of marriage. ‘What’s the point of it?’ she demanded as I proposed on bended knee in Sydney’s Rushcutters Bay Park the hazy hour after a party. Just to be on the safe side, I proposed again a short time later as we unsteadily straddled the wall, the harbour quivering with light beside us. ‘We already love each other. Why do we need a piece of paper to prove it?’ She had a point, of course. Bel generally did. But I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for such rational considerations. ‘I want to say I love you in front of all our friends,’ I said, endeavouring to not topple into the harbour. ‘And I want to swing from a chandelier.’ Despite my success in not falling into the water, Bel took my question on notice. It was easy for me, of course. I was possessed by a dazzlingly rare certainty and had been ever since the moment more than a year earlier when Bel used a piece I’d just had published to concoct a pickup line that was as flimsy as it was effective: that she was the one. Problematically, I arrived at this entirely accurate conclusion much sooner than she did. So first we passed through what I would come to think of as the Year of Troubles, twelve months in which our romance was feverishly on again, melodramatically off again. That sorted, we were now most definitely on. Except for the nuptial bit. We climbed off that wall and wandered off into a happy uncertainty. If absence makes the heart grow fonder, I was in luck as a monthlong exile soon loomed. After a fun altercation with a much more senior colleague, I was suddenly and mysteriously offered a gig that even at the time seemed amusingly generous. I was going to go to Eden, a town on the far south coast of New South Wales that had just lost its main source of employment. And I was going to spend a month there and write a story. A story. One. Story. With the passage of time and the relentless thinning of newspaper staffs, this has taken on the air of something lodged firmly between hilarity and miracle. Bel gave me copies of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (which I still haven’t read) and Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana (which I promptly read and reread). In return, I gave her my turtles, Omsk and Tomsk, to look after while I was away. I can’t pretend it wasn’t wonderful. The local tuna cannery had closed, but I found people keeping their upper lips stiff. I found poetry and music and humour and stoicism. I found an old whaler in a nursing home, the years fleetingly falling away from him as he told me about the orca that used to help out him and his crew mates when they were out with their harpoons. And one night in the warm rain, I found a road convulsing with frogs, an amphibious upheaval of leaping, glistening skin that made me bark with joyful laughter. Amid it all, Bel was due to fly down. Part of my mind kept whirring away on my marriage proposal. I was upbeat about the prospect that she would say yes, but I was anxious. I was desperate to know, but I knew I couldn’t push it. I would treat it like some delicate plant, afraid even to look at it too long lest it wilt. But dear God I wanted to know. I set off for the airport at Merimbula, half an hour to the north, arriving in time to watch as the little plane taxied over, buzzing like an ambitious mosquito, and disgorged its passengers. There was no sign of Bel. I allowed myself to imagine she was still on board trying to wrestle her bag out of the overhead locker, when a loudspeaker crackled to life and snuffed out that line of thinking with the sound of my name. Bel’s voice was heaving as it came down the phone line from Sydney airport, her distress punctuated by bursts of indignation. ‘The plane was still bloody there but they wouldn’t let me on!’ As I pondered her absence, I thought about joking that this cock-up was surely deserving of the No Bel Prize—but given how upset she was, I thought better of it. It was time instead for practical solutions. I told Bel to get the train as far south as she could and I’d meet her there. This turned out to be Nowra, and we set off on our separate odysseys. Later, Bel would tell friends we’d met halfway, which was a bit like suggesting that the collarbone is halfway to the feet. But it didn’t matter. We nearly cracked each other’s ribs out of pure happiness by the platform late that night, then jumped in the car. We paused at a truck stop, where the tables were improbably festooned with doilies and the TV was playing Rage, unspooling one music video after another. ‘Darl,’ called the beefy tattooed bloke behind the counter. ‘Your song’s on.’ It was a song we’d already fallen helplessly in love with: Machine Gun Fellatio’s ‘Mutha Fukka on a Motorcycle’. There amid the doilies, it was cemented into the pantheon of what we considered our songs. We drove through the night in a delirium of happiness, finally rolling into Eden as the darkness began to loosen its grip in the east. Then in the sunshine of that weekend, Bel and I went wandering down a zigzag footpath called Warren’s Walk when she slipped ahead of me, spun around with a huge smile and said, ‘Yes’. Dear reader, there were fireworks. It was perhaps in travel that we truly found each other. A few months after the Eden expedition, we loaded up my car and headed out on our first outback trip, aiming for Tibooburra in the north-west corner of New South Wales. Against expectation, we were met by rain in Broken Hill. The road north to Tibooburra was promptly closed and we loitered, methodically exhausting Broken Hill’s possibilities. We passed the time camping by the lake at Menindee, 100 kilometres down the road, and woke to a peculiar drumming sound. Once we’d established that neither of us had developed an exotic snore, we unzipped the tent and watched as a pair of emus walked past, chatting away like two friends on their morning constitutional. But the rain reached us there, too, and we packed the tent and drove out as the road turned to mud, my old station wagon spinning and sliding all over the place like a drunken figure-skater. In desperation, we turned south and bit by bit found ourselves profoundly sad in an Adelaide cafe, our outback dream apparently dead except for a glossy photo of Uluru on the wall. We looked at it, then at each other. ‘Do you think …?’ began Bel. No, it was too crazily far. And we’d already used up a chunk of our fortnight. We settled on the idea of camping in South Australia’s Flinders Ranges as a consolation prize (an idea we laughed about years later when we discovered how beautiful it was) and began on the road north as the sun settled on the horizon. But we couldn’t quite shake the idea of the Rock and that ocean of spinifex and paprika-coloured sand. As we drove, we kept passing turn-offs to Port Augusta, home to one of the nation’s great traffic intersections: one turn sets you on the road to the Nullarbor Plain and Perth, the other right up through the centre of Australia, finally bringing you to an innocuous little roundabout in Darwin. Each time a Port Augusta sign flared in the headlights, we took it in turns to remind the other that it was—however daft—a possibility. A possibility that, with an unapologetically graceless swerve, we eventually took. A little while later, we drove out of the night into the fluorescent glow of a Port Augusta service station and filled the petrol tank with a dizzy sense of purpose. The following morning, we’d be huddled by the car we’d slept fitfully in somewhere north of

Woomera, trying to keep the flimsy flame on the primus from blowing out while we cooked porridge. Ahead of us stretched a road filled with the promise of adventure and our first encounter with Australia’s heart. And beyond that, marriage and the future of our lives together and whatever that would bring. But it was at this point, where the two roads diverged and we picked the one that had been most incessantly calling to us, that Bel spelled out what would become the philosophy that lies at the heart of our marriage. ‘It’s mad,’ she said, her eyes ablaze as they met mine. ‘But viable.’ When Bel and I celebrated fifteen years of marriage a couple of years back, we were delighted to discover it was our crystal anniversary. After a decade and a half of conjugal felicity, we’d finally moved into the realm of quality merchandise. Even ten years of marriage gives you only the tin anniversary, which sounds like it could double as a New Zealand joke. The first anniversary is paper, which was fittingly minimalist for us at the time—we were in Dublin and skint, just scraping together the cash to catch the train to the seaside and get a slice of pizza each. But the tide was out—so much so that as we stared across the damp, sandy plain it was as if the sea had vanished, leaving open the possibility of a long stroll to Wales. The distant figures of a man and his dog silhouetted against the dimming autumn sky suddenly struck us as deeply sombre, and our stoicism gave way to misery. Huddled in the lacerating cold, we thought back to twelve months earlier when, surrounded by friends and family and love and flowers and world-record quantities of champagne, we’d said ‘I do’ in the subtropical wonderland of Bel’s parents’ garden, jacaranda flowers falling around us. We schlepped back to Dublin under clouds both figurative and literal. By the following November—our cotton anniversary—things had improved a bit. We were in Moscow with a brand-new baby and our friend, Olivia, who carelessly volunteered for her first babysitting assignment so that we could go to the Italian restaurant across the road. Bel and I walked into the night, the falling snow standing in for the jacarandas. It was a lovely evening, with the added bonus of the traumatised expression on Olivia’s face when we got home. Back in Australia, we progressed through the anniversaries—leather, wool, salt and copper among them—finally making it to tin. This was a very Sydney anniversary, Bel having secretly booked us into a garden apartment on Cockatoo Island. As we arrived, a security guard blew the surprise for the birthday boy in the other party arriving with us on the ferry. But we were sweet and drank wine on our borrowed lawn, gazing across the harbour and counting the fruit bats landing in the trees, each one touching down with the finesse of a drunk trying to get a key into a lock. I thought back to the moment just over a decade earlier when Dad had taken me aside, looked me in the eye through his askew spectacles, and said: ‘I’ve found the best approach in life is to expect the worst. That way, if the worst doesn’t eventuate, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.’ I just stood there blinking at him. That said, Dad was deeply chuffed about our wedding, not least because Bel had asked him for my hand. Now we’ve made it to crystal, and I talk to the two children born out of the love expressed that November afternoon. I tell them about a wedding almost single-handedly put together by their grandmother, Sue, and about how so many friends travelled hundreds of kilometres to be with us. I tell them about their cousin Claudia, shyly tottering towards us with the rings. I tell them about how it went all weekend, and how on the night after the ceremony, their grandfather Garth, who’d been leant on to keep it brief on the big day, gave the director’s cut of his speech, and it was one of the most beautiful things we’d heard. I tell them how the fireworks—planned by their uncle Hugh but decommissioned by rain—were finally let off. One of them—the cracker equivalent of a multiple rocket-launcher—wasn’t properly secured, falling over with the first shot then spinning around with each fresh blast. It was like a roulette wheel shooting in all directions, outraging the frogs in the dam and even firing one blazing ball that streaked up through the garden between me and Bel before screaming into the rockery. It was magnificent, though I can still hear the voice of my young cousin Michael: ‘Can we go home, Daddy?’ The glow of that weekend is with us still. I keep my fingers crossed for the silver and gold anniversaries ahead. If we make it through life’s wild fireworks to November 2085, it will be our wine anniversary, an event I like to imagine will be celebrated by two happy Methuselahs with a bottle, sitting together under a jacaranda.

PART IV

the world keeps turning

20 opal country IT WAS ON OUR way to Lightning Ridge that Dad and I passed a billboard emblazoned with the words, ‘HEAVEN OR HELL—IT’S YOUR CHOICE’. We turned up the Nick Cave on the stereo and I gave the accelerator a little extra nudge, just to be on the safe side. As we went, he began telling me some anecdote. It was one he’d shared just a couple of hours earlier, and he told it almost word for word. I kept my eyes on the road, gripped the steering wheel a little harder and let him talk on. It’s hard to say for sure when we first thought Dad might have dementia, when we first feared that the slowly firming patterns of forgetfulness and repetition and mystifying hostilities were adding up to something terrible. There were some warning signs a few years earlier, when I took him on a trip to Central Australia for his seventieth birthday; he’d been talking about going to the Outback ‘one of these days’ pretty much ever since we arrived in 1976, so I gave things a little nudge along. It was a fun trip, give or take the fact I came down with the flu on the second day. And that Dad’s various eccentricities took the opportunity to climb, quietly, to a new level. One of these was his tendency to read signs aloud as we drove along. He’d done it for a while, but only in bursts and in a way clearly meant to share information and, in many cases, his amusement. But by this point, it was any word on any surface, and all delivered in an unrelenting monotone. You’d be surprised how many signs there are as you travel west of Alice Springs into the West MacDonnells, and he got every single one of them. We may have been entering the landscape that had so captured Albert Namatjira and been captured by him in return, but my focus was beginning to harden around that voice: ‘dip’, ‘hump’, ‘grid’, ‘give way’, ‘flood zone’ … ‘Dad, please stop reading the signs aloud.’ ‘I thought it might be helpful to you.’ ‘It’s okay, I can read them. Just please take a break from reading them.’ A terse silence descended and a couple of signs passed unannounced. I thought we were good, but then another sign hove into view. Dad read aloud the first syllable, stopped, then flicked his tone to heavy sarcasm. ‘Oh, I forgot! You can read!’ The brilliance of the landscape and the light meant we soon put this little moment behind us. But there was more fun to come. At Kings Canyon, I made the mistake of booking us into the seven-course degustation dinner beneath the stars. Dad shovelled each delicate morsel into his mouth as though he were shovelling coal into a furnace, the only difference being that shovelling coal would have brought him some happiness. At the end he confessed, ‘I’ve always found dinner one of those things I just have to get through’. But that was just the way his tastebuds had always been: as pleasure-resistant as a Calvinist convention. What happened at the resort near Uluru a couple of days later was different. It was a development. By this stage, my flu was having a grand old time rioting through my body and I told Dad I was going to have to crash for an hour. ‘Go for a walk,’ I told him. ‘You can see the Rock from here.’ He did no such thing and when I finally peeled myself off the bed, I opened the door and nearly passed out from the smell—a sickly, cloying odour that was familiar in all respects except for its sheer magnitude. ‘What the bloody hell’s happened?’ I asked, opening the door and trying to fan in some oxygen. The desert air was ferociously hot, but at least you could still breathe it. Dad glared up at the air-conditioning unit and deployed the poisonously cold tone he used to reserve for Mum. ‘There is a fly in there.’ ‘What?’ ‘There is a fly in that. A wretched, noisy insect.’ ‘In the air conditioner?’ ‘That is what I am trying to tell you, bonny lad, yes.’ I listened to the air conditioner buzzing softly and began to entertain the possibility I might be hallucinating. Which was a very real possibility, given what Dad had been up to. ‘What fly?’ I asked, a little apprehensively. ‘Can’t you hear that buzzing?’ It was then that Dad explained how he’d spent his hour. He’d been sitting on the sofa getting angrier and angrier at the buzz, convinced there was a fly. Then, being an engineer, he decided a practical solution was called for. Rummaging through the holiday apartment’s cupboards, he’d found a can of flyspray under the sink, dragged a chair under the air conditioner, climbed up and pointed the nozzle into the vent, whereupon he let the ‘fly’ absolutely have it. I picked up the can and was disconcerted by how light it was. ‘You, um, used a lot, Dad.’ He looked at me as though I were simple. ‘It wouldn’t stop buzzing.’ And still the soft and clearly mechanical buzz went on—if you listened really, really hard. ‘Dad, there’s no fly. It’s just the aircon. There. Is. No. Fly.’ A look of unhappy exasperation flashed across his face. ‘You should have your ears seen to, bonny lad.’ Most of the rest of that trip was fine and Dad spent a lot of it in a dreamy happiness, laying his hands on things as we went— orange rocks, white bark, red sand—just to feel that bit more connected with the country he’d chosen as his home all those years before. He swayed before the sight of Uluru, immense and singular on the plain. We hiked between the Rubenesque formations of Kata Tjuta and, owing to the fact his knees weren’t up to tackling the steep trail, beheld Kings Canyon from a helicopter. But his eyes never strayed from the small things. When he had his first encounter with wild zebra finches—a personal favourite of his—he just melted, listening in rapture as they called in their little zing-zing voices from among the spinifex. Then we went home to Sydney, and whatever was happening in his brain just kept right on happening. Bit by bit, as tiny pieces of him fell away, Olivia and I had quiet but ever more urgent conversations. He had to be taken to a specialist and tested, if only to confirm what we already knew was true. But how do you bring it up with someone? How do you initiate that conversation? ‘Dad, we just thought we should have a little chat about how we think you may be losing your mind and everything you are is in the process of crumbling away to nothing. Do you fancy a cuppa?’ What I can say for certain is when it was that I first confronted him. It was during a trip to Lightning Ridge, up among the opal fields of northern New South Wales. I first went to the Ridge as a boy, courtesy of Mum and János, who had friends up there. They were an older couple who lived out of town on their claim amid talcum-fine dust and temperatures so high that the moment you stepped outside your eyeballs began evaporating. Their dog was a dreadlocked Hungarian breed called a puli, and how it survived was a mystery. Tree frogs sang from inside the safe darkness of the water tank, and pinecone-skinned shingleback lizards lumbered about with short legs

and rueful expressions. But inside, the demountable was so fancifully decorated with carpets and fussy pieces of Hungarian porcelain it felt like you’d slipped down a wormhole into the Habsburg Empire. You were quickly brought back to the earth by the outdoor dunny, which had been carefully positioned over an abandoned mineshaft. After what we’d been taught recently at school about gravity, I went to the loo with a handful of pebbles, dropped them one by one and counted the seconds until they landed with disconcerting splats. It was a very long way down. There were stories about people who’d managed to fall into their long-drops, and I was haunted for some time by unspeakably vivid mental images. But the most important part of Lightning Ridge life was the artesian bore bath, where we crowded in with all the Croats, Poles, Serbs, Germans and Hungarians—a typical sort of opal-town mix. As we slowly became immune to the eggy steam, I listened to the Hungarians reminisce about the whiffy spa towns back home. The last time we went, the Ridge felt even hotter than usual. Mum and János made the tactical error of getting a big bottle of soft drink, which is probably the worst thing to get when it’s nearly as hot as the surface of Venus. Olivia and I got the lid off it and had a gulp each. But there’s nothing like sugary fizzy water to make you even thirstier, and we gulped some more. And some more. And more. János came over and, well, things didn’t really pan out. ‘Look at them, they drank the lot!’ he shouted, before explaining to Mum in no uncertain terms that she’d raised a pair of greedy, selfish pricks and, furthermore, he wasn’t going to stay in Lightning Ridge another minute. Suddenly, we were back at the camp site where he collapsed the tent in a rage and before we knew it, we were southbound a couple of days earlier than planned. Olivia and I were still thirsty. We drove for twelve hours in near-perfect silence. But because we’d left late in the afternoon, much of it was in the dark. As we passed midnight, János drove grimly on. We wondered what the chances were of him falling asleep and accidentally killing us all, a line of thinking that at least helped pass the time. As it was, the drive was largely uneventful, give or take the agonising, silent tension. That and the cops who pulled us over in the Blue Mountains roughly a gazillion hours into the drive. ‘How long have you been on the road, driver?’ one asked, his face at the window. ‘Six … six hours?’ János ventured meekly. It was a bit of a jolt hearing his voice after all those hours. Ditto Mum’s. ‘Six hours!’ she scoffed. ‘He has been driving all night. And do you know why? Because he is an idiot.’ The officer took this information on board, but it was almost as if police were now pre-programmed to be wary of interaction with Mum. ‘Mate,’ he said to János, ‘you were driving behind our patrol car for the last couple of k’s with your high beams on.’ ‘I’m very sorry, officer,’ János said. ‘Get some rest.’ We got back under way, and so did Mum. ‘You see that, kids? What a big man! He can be an arse-head around us, but when the police come he is such a good little boy.’ The silence fell again and we drove on. Whenever I think of that night, it’s usually counterbalanced by more typical memories of János. He was a constant joker and the first person I knew who mashed Hungarian and English words together for a pleasingly juvenile effect. For example, the African Lion Safari—one of our regular destinations in Western Sydney, now long gone—had its ‘f’ and ‘s’ sounds switched and became the African Lion Faszari, ‘faszari’ being a play on prick. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. Another cherished memory comes from the similarly vanished Bullen’s Animal World, where a randy emu got into the playground, cornered János against the cyclone-wire fence and had a solid crack at mounting him. I’m ashamed to say Olivia and I giggled from the safety of the trampoline. As for the night of the long drive itself, I had more than an inkling that something bigger than a bottle of soft drink was at stake. Mum and János’s marriage was still fairly young, but already deep into its autumn. On balance, my memories of the Lightning Ridge trips with Mum and János are fond ones. They were my introduction to Australia’s vast interior, and gave me my first glimpse of a night sky that was filled with stars; the first time I looked up, I thought my brain was going to slide straight out of the back of my head as I finally understood why it was called the Milky Way. Looking back, I think that’s one of the big reasons I wanted Dad, a dedicated member of his local amateur astronomy group, to be part of my Ridge memories. Dad, being Dad, ignored my advice about entering the artesian pool slowly; as a man with a proper degree, he wasn’t going to cop advice from an arts graduate. Instead, he assumed an air of derring-do and plopped himself into the water, which, as was suddenly confirmed for him, was precisely as I’d described it: bloody hot. How his eyes bulged. But there was plenty of mining stuff to look at, which he loved, likewise the stars, which at that moonless time of the month crowded the blackness out of the sky. We visited the Walk-in Mine at Bald Hill and sat through a video in which a local woman explained the basic dynamics of what happens when an opal miner hits the jackpot: ‘Yesterday’s arsehole is tomorrow’s best mate to everyone.’ Then we went 30 kilometres up the road to the Coocoran field, where our guide, Andrew, was still doing a spot of mining in between running a cafe, jewellery shop and accommodation in town with his wife, Jo. ‘It was unstable ground but it had lots of unusual, brilliant opal,’ he explained as we headed up. ‘The Japanese were flying straight in with suitcases full of money.’ The money flooding in changed tastes, if not habits. Miners used to a threadbare experience were buying themselves Mercedes, only to abandon them after a couple of years, covered in roo dents. It all came to a head in the mid-1980s with a bacchanalian four-day bender in the scrub. ‘Oysters were flown in. There was beer, drugs, prostitutes, hundreds of people,’ Andrew said. If we wandered around long enough, he said, we’d find oyster shells that have been lying here for more than twenty years. ‘White man’s middens.’ ‘A bit of a different mob to the coalminers,’ Dad observed. As we walked across a cracked claypan in the wilting heat, which Dad was determinedly overdressed for, he was the very picture of contentment. And then we popped over to Grawin—sold to us as ‘like Lightning Ridge before the cops came’—and had beer at the Club in the Scrub, a majestically slight structure advertised for kilometres ahead with signs painted on car doors and wedged into the forks of the trees that line the dirt road. There, under that perfectly empty blue sky, he began repeating himself as surely as a stuck stylus. Driving back along the dirt road, the view in the rear-vision mirror a perfect cloud of red talcum billowing in our wake, I started speaking. ‘Dad, I think you might have a problem …’ I was suddenly, oddly, keenly aware of the seatbelt sash across my chest and the gearstick in my hand. And I heard my words as if someone else were speaking them. Especially when I got to the d-word. Not surprisingly, Dad didn’t take it well and demanded I stop the car. He got out and began walking along the road towards Lightning Ridge, many kilometres distant. I started to follow him. All was silent apart from our footsteps and the click and buzz of locusts launching themselves out of the desiccated stubble. ‘Come on, Dad,’ I called after him. ‘We have to talk about what’s happening to you.’ I still see his face as he spun back towards me, an alloy of anger and fear as his voice tore the drowsy stillness. ‘Do you think I’m not aware?’ I stopped and let him march on for a while, and listened to the gentle ticking of the engine as it began to cool. The sky was immense, but the world beneath it was suddenly smaller.

21 morning-after dill THE WORST HANGOVER I ever had was at the age of nineteen in the German embassy in Moscow. Amid the shifting sands of memory, this is one personal fact that has stood the test of time, as safe from challenge as John Howard was from Peter Costello. Although I didn’t appreciate it at the time, hangovers have a silver lining of their very own. On that bleak wintry morning, all I noticed was the brutality of its cloud. I came to in a room I didn’t recognise, consciousness backing over me like a garbage truck that spun its wheels then started doing doughnuts. Gravity rushed at me from every direction, hope from none. Shame rose like floodwater; confusion, pain and fragments of memory fell like hail. In the roaring static of my brain, pictures began to appear of a party the night before. I remembered two of my many hosts proudly showing me the bier zimmer—a storeroom stuffed to the ceiling with Beck’s lager. They grabbed two slabs and parked them on the snowy balcony, and the two already out there were brought inside and ripped open with Teutonic efficiency. This process was repeated often. There was joy, there was merriment, there was raucousness, there was schnapps, there was wooziness. Then messiness. Then oblivion. As with space travel, drinking has a spectacular launch followed by a period of zero gravity, followed by the horror of reentry. I remember being gently guided out of the building, through security gates and into the snow-blanketed morning. I was struggling to think in English, much less speak in Russian. The air was so cold my lips may as well have been a pair of rubber chickens. Then I slipped on ice and fell. I considered just staying there a while, praying for a fresh snowfall to entomb me forever in soothing white. This was more than a little fanciful, not least because Moscow snow stays white for a period that falls well short of a day, let alone eternity. As it was, the dream lasted only the few seconds it took before someone hooked an arm under mine and, in what seemed a well-practised manoeuvre, yanked me back on to my feet. As I stood there swaying, I managed to force out two-thirds of the syllables required for ‘Thank you’ in Russian. ‘To your health!’ he cried, without looking back. I pushed on, my love of life crumbling with every step. Everything— movement; hearing; seeing; blinking; existence—was an ordeal. It was Robert Benchley who got us close to the true power of a hangover when he said that the only true cure for one was death. This is surely fighting fire with fire, for what is a hangover if not one of death’s lesser cousins? It is a temporary extinction, the vital yang to blotto’s yin. A hangover, properly done, lets you step outside yourself and take stock while equipped with a perspective different from the one you carry in day-to-day life. It lets you re-evaluate like a terrible illness does, but minus illness’s pitfalls. It lets you view your life from underneath like a magically finite form of melancholy. And just as one of the joys of travel is going home and seeing the place with a fresh appreciation, so a hangover works as a journey away from yourself. Just so long as you don’t ‘travel’ so often that the concept of home blurs. As for the physical return home that fateful morning, when I finally clapped eyes on my apartment block, all that stopped me falling to the ground and weeping was the knowledge I wouldn’t get up again. The lift, with its tiny and sporadically functional light bulb and less sporadic hint of urine, shuddered its way up the shaft to where my host mother, Svetlana, ushered me in and propped me up on a divan. I was plied with mineral water and salted cucumbers, guarded the whole while by Lordig, a Siamese cat with eyes like one of Satan’s stormtroopers and a scrotum like a kiwifruit. In a significant break from his usual behaviour, he purred. The hours passed, the hammer blows from the clock slowly fading to ticks. Gingerly but with growing confidence, my soul crawled out of the wasteland and I began to sense the familiar surroundings of myself. Home at last and wrapped anew in the warmth of life’s love, I vowed never to stray so far again.

22 carried away by ants IT WAS A SUNDAY when Dad first forgot my name. Olivia rang to break the news, exhausted but still managing to muster an air of mock celebration. ‘Congratulations. You’re now “the man with two children”.’ It had been coming for a while. We’d been warned our father’s form of dementia would go from gradual descent to nosedive. He’d been staying with me only the Sunday before. The morning had found him confused and angry, but by late afternoon his old personality had surfaced in the bleak murk of his brain. We worked together in the garden, knocking off now and then for a cup of tea. As the day faded, I lit a fire and we drank beer, watching a fat, orange moon blossoming among the branches of the jacaranda. He was only too aware of his disintegration, and while we talked about happier things—mainly his grandchildren—the dementia kept drawing us back. ‘After all I’ve achieved in my life, this is all it boils down to,’ he mused. If anything, this was harder than seeing him in the full grip of his disease. It was the most bittersweet of nights and, as it proved, the closing of a chapter. The following morning, as I spread jam on his toast, he looked at me with a look of genuine curiosity and asked: ‘What line of work are you in?’ This from the man who’d been the embodiment of excessive paternal pride, cornering even the vaguest of acquaintances to show them something with my byline on it. By evening, he was hallucinating. My father-in-law, Garth, and I found him on the street, convinced the house had been invaded by a platoon of silent strangers. The house was empty, of course. I looked at Dad—the man who’d raised me and my sister almost single-handed—and saw a small, pale man cowering from phantoms. The next morning, he knew something had gone awry in his head, but still couldn’t quite let go of his silent strangers. I held him, something I’d barely done for years. Even with his illness, he’d been relatively functional, but as the dementia made inroads into his brain, his visits became something I endured with a shameful lack of grace. How much so wasn’t hammered home until a couple of months ago when I, apropos of something or other, cheerfully suggested I had a sunny personality. Dad would often be in his own little world, but this time he snapped to attention. ‘You have a what?’ There followed a bout of sardonic laughter, one he rounded off with one of his favourite lines: ‘Ah, it’s the way he tells them.’ I pondered the bunched-up, sarcastic person I’d morphed into in his presence, angry at him for the way his illness had exaggerated his worst tendencies, angry at him for his glacial but undeniable erosion. Other times I found myself hoping he would die—quickly and painlessly, obviously—to spare him the horror and to let me get on with remembering him as he was before the long unravelling began. It’s a thought I wished I could unthink, but instead kept thinking it anew. All things considered, sardonic laughter was a gentle response. Dad finally left my place and the phantoms and returned home with my sister to the house we’d grown up in. It didn’t last. There, in the hallway where he used to make comical monster noises, catching and tickling us in a game he’d invented to cheer us up after Mum left, he collapsed so hard he put a hole in the wall. Within days, he was moved into the dementia ward of a nursing home. I cried with shock after seeing him in there the first time. But during his more lucid moments, Dad seems almost relieved something happened and there are others making decisions for him now. Sometimes he’s plotting his escape, other times speaking more as an observer, expressing pity for the ‘poor buggers’ around him: the dazed, the blank, the frightened, the ones drifting the corridors in nighties and clinging to dolls, their failing brains sloughing history and experience and dragging them back to the beginning of life. They shuffle to the door where visitors press a code into a keypad to let themselves out. They stare, pushing against the unyielding wood with looks of sad befuddlement. The door and the wall around it are painted with a gay scene of coral-reef fish, the only branch of the animal kingdom Dad ever declared himself to be ‘thoroughly bored by’. Dad is sometimes happy in the garden, pointing out how you can see ‘all the way to the city’, the distant towers framed by bird of paradise and agapanthus, but sometimes he’s seized by random, obscure rages even there. Other times, he’s falling backwards through time, looking for his boots so he can clock on at the colliery he worked at decades ago. He’ll probably wind up as a young father again, asking me how my day at school was. It will be a return home, of sorts. He still has the company of his phantoms. Bit by bit, they grow more assertive as the flesh-and-blood people in his life slip out of focus, flicker and fade. Then, one day, I’ll go out into that garden and sit among the flowers with a man who looks like my father. That was the hardest column I had yet written. When I finished typing it, I stared at the last seven words for a very long time. As it turned out, we didn’t have long at all and I was soon writing the most bittersweet of follow-ups. Dad would never have admitted it, but I think he secretly enjoyed Christmas. For all his bah-humbuggery, he always embarked on his grumbles about the festive season’s ‘crass commercialisation’—the ‘r’ in the crass rolled extra hard—with the same lipsmacking relish others save for glazed ham. So it’s going to be strange on Wednesday, the first Christmas in decades without the benefit of an Ian Jeffrey grizzle. What’s going to be even harder is the following Wednesday, when the rest of us move on into 2014 and he stays behind, irretrievably a part of ‘last year’. He died in May, but it will be only then at the stroke of midnight that my father will finally belong to the past. When it came to talking hypothetically about his death, Dad was a staunch traditionalist. ‘If I get hit by a bus,’ he’d begin, before embarking on his latest posthumous scenario. It’s not like he hadn’t been around more dramatic forms of death. As a mining engineer, he’d lost friends and colleagues underground in roof collapses and plummeting lift cages. Then, late one winter’s night in 1979, fourteen lives that overlapped with his were snuffed out in a roar of exploding methane. But whenever Dad pondered his own eventual exit from this world, he clung to that bus. It never came, of course. The juggernaut of dementia and Parkinson’s got him in the end, a slow-motion obliteration that devoured names and decades and faces, leaving Dad as a time traveller bobbing up at random moments in his own life, convinced each time he’d finally arrived at the right moment and that the fog—the maddening, frustrating, terrifying fog— would at last abate. But the buses and the mines rarely left us during those last few months as his brain unravelled. Convinced the nursing home sat atop a mineshaft, Dad was forever hunting for his boots. ‘My shift starts soon,’ he’d fret, looking under beds and in cupboards in vain. Other times he’d just sigh and whisper to me that he was thinking of ‘giving this work thing away’. He was, he’d assure me, ready to retire. What was more, that bus was coming soon to take him home. How he waited.

In the nursing home’s garden—the one place Dad managed to find some fragments of peace in those final months—one of the benches was made up as a bus stop, but Dad never cared to sit there. No matter how addled he became, he knew no bus was ever going to disturb that garden. It would come for him ‘out there’, he’d say, pointing without fail towards the street he knew would lead him away from this place he’d so inexplicably, so terribly fallen into. He never did get that bus. His last excursion was to hospital when his sodium levels ran riot. When they finally brought him back, the talk of buses was done. Dad was ebbing into that final stillness that, as it turned out, was less than a week away. There were sad, quiet, murmuring huddles with doctors and nurses in the corridor outside his room, as though there was anything we could say that could disturb him now. He managed a word or two, and a smile for his grandchildren, every effort wrenching his exhausted body. It was music that spoke to him last. It was a Saturday afternoon and Daisy—who was suddenly about to do a whole lot of growing up—held his hand and told him how much she loved him. Olivia, who’d been in with him for ages, had gone home for a short rest, as convinced as the rest of us that we still had a few days left. I turned off the iPod that had been acting as the Ian Jeffrey Jukebox for days on end and started playing the softest of my uilleann pipes, the ones I used to play the kids to sleep with. Switching between that and my low whistle, I quietly alternated between two of the tunes he’d asked for most towards the end—‘Flower of Scotland’ and ‘The Mingulay Boat Song’. And then, halfway through the afternoon as Olivia was getting ready to head back in, Dad’s heavy eyelids opened wide the way they did when he’d spotted something in the bush that delighted him—a crimson rosella, a Gymea lily in full bloom, a dog cocking its leg. And there in that small room, bathed in autumn sunlight and wrapped in the melodies of his beloved Scotland, he sighed and, without so much as a grumble for old times’ sake, left. It’s a paradox of sorts that someone else’s death can give you an out-ofbody experience. I pretty much floated through the days that followed, as did Olivia. We were like astronauts bumping into each other, dimly following what we knew was the accepted pattern in the event of a loved one’s extinction. First up we blundered into the funeral home, only to be informed that we really ought to have made an appointment. ‘Appointment?’ I said, probably sounding like someone having their very first encounter with the word. It seemed like such a prosaic nicety to adhere to in a time of calamity—we were so out of it with grief and shock that we expected everyone else would treat us with due deference and fling open doors for us. But they made room for us anyway and, with our hands gently held by people experienced in dealing with the suddenly and terribly and inexpressibly saddened, we were guided through the expensive process of farewelling the man who’d been there with us from the moment we first drew breath. It was a process not entirely without its moments of accidental magnificence, not least when Olivia and I went to the printer’s to pick up the cards we were going to hand out at the funeral. The photo looked fine—it was one from Dad’s university reprobate days—as did the border, which was sombre yet elegant. But there, embossed in black, was his new expanded lifespan: 18/8/1834–25/5/2013. We pointed this out to the printer, who rightly replied that we’d proofread it for him. Between us, we’d made him 178 years old. A fresh batch of cards was printed in time, but Olivia and I agreed afterwards that Dad would have probably preferred the botched ones. The man who’d taken in his later years to insisting he was not from Derbyshire, as previously stated, but the planet Gallifrey, would have smiled his gentle smile that curved down slightly at the edges and said, ‘I told you I was a Time Lord.’ Dad’s Doctor Who obsession was something we very much kept in mind during the final preparations. And out of it came one last column; he always did appreciate the publicity. ‘You probably sell more papers every time I’m in,’ he mentioned to me once, before segueing off into a random bit of humming. In the dim light of an undertaker’s viewing room his face looked oddly unfamiliar, as though death had bestowed a mask to let him slip away undetected. This suited him, in a way; Dad had become unrecognisable towards the end, his personality carried away by dementia in a million tiny fragments like a picnic carted off by ants. But his hands looked the same. Freed from the tremors of Parkinson’s that had kept the dementia company, they had fallen still at last. Just as I’d so often done at the nursing home, I wrapped those hands in mine. I tried to ignore their jarring cold, cradling those fingers that had always seemed so elegant for someone who’d taken such pride in being a mining engineer. I knew every mottle and every hair; the index finger that used to wag in my direction; and the ring finger that still looked like it was missing something even though it was decades since he’d sent his wedding band ricocheting down a hallway during one of his final arguments with Mum. Those hands had always seemed so strong and clever and impish to me when I was growing up. When I was small, they’d flung me joyfully in the air, or dangled me while raspberries were blown on my belly. When I grew too big to throw, there were tousles of the hair and hugs. He’d waggle his hands at the side of his head while rolling his eyes and making silly noises, chasing me and my little sister around the house in the guise of a tickling monster we’d dubbed the Mercatops Poo. When the Mercatops caught its helplessly laughing prey it was tickle time; how we never wet our pants remains a source of wonder. And when things quietened down, those hands tucked us into bed as we wished each other ‘no number’, the family shorthand for a wealth of kisses so vast it was beyond the realm of counting. Those hands had wielded picks and changed tyres. They’d worked deep under the ground and, when the coalmining industry tried to go belly up, they’d pushed mops and noisy machines that waxed floors. They’d built an aviary and steered cars across continents. They’d bashed out squalls of hilariously tetchy letters to the local paper, and created handwriting so thinly related to any recognisable alphabet even his doctor was impressed. They’d patted a succession of dogs into ecstasy, and gently cupped young finches that had tumbled from the aviary nests. Years later, when I took Dad to Central Australia, he’d laid them with wonder on the red of the rocks and the white of the ghost gums. And then in what proved to be our final coherent conversation, those hands had squeezed mine as he let out his anger and fear of what was to come. Now they were motionless, like the rest of him. Olivia was crying in the waiting room. Mum was outside having a smoke. The sight of her ex-husband in his final stillness had prompted a river of almost operatic grief; but this was but a small tributary stream compared to the mighty flow that would follow a few cigarettes later as she reflected on her own mortality. But for now, it was just me and Dad. In a couple of days at the funeral, the coffin would become just a box, Dad’s essence instead alive in the photos projected onto the chapel wall, in the music we played, the stories we told. Before then, though, there was one last thing to do. I smiled at the lurid scarf carefully folded into the coffin. This had been my sister’s childhood attempt at creating a Tom Baker–style scarf for Dad, a Doctor Who fan of many years’ standing. The picture had to be completed. From my pocket, I pulled a sonic screwdriver—the Doctor’s multipurpose tool for getting out of sticky spots—and placed it in Dad’s hands. I nearly giggled at the mad incongruity of it all. Dad would have been thrilled. I kissed his chilly forehead and whispered, ‘No number’. The conversation would in its own way go on, but from this moment Dad would be a memory. I looked back one more time at the giant of my childhood and closed the door.

23 here’s johnny WITH ALL RESPECT TO the Wiggles, there surely comes a point in any young parent’s life when they want just to lie down in the road and get run over by the Big Red Car. Or get eaten by Dorothy the Dinosaur. Or for Captain Feathersword finally to go mad and push them off the end of the plank into the shark-filled sea. Anything to make it fucking stop. I love a talented, charming children’s supergroup as much as the next person, but there’s always too much of a good thing. Like being dropped into the centre of a pavlova the size of a house and left to eat your way out, what sounds sweet and fun is, when put into practice, unrelenting hell. Especially if you let your child fall into addiction. And as we all know, when there’s an addict, they are merely the epicentre of a great circle of suffering. And it’s easily done. I lost count of the number of mums and dads—hollow-eyed, facial muscles twitching—recounting how they’d let themselves walk into the trap: ‘If we drive more than two blocks without the Wiggles, the screaming starts …’ One friend described driving the 1700-odd kilometres from Brisbane to Melbourne, the car stereo Wiggling the whole way. It sounded like the sort of scenario that would have inspired Dante to put quill to parchment. No wonder Jeff didn’t want to wake up. We had to break the cycle before it began. Our first attempt, it must be said, was not a raging success. When Daisy was not quite three years old, we took her to the Cockatoo Island music festival in Sydney Harbour. Amid the colonial architecture and rusting industrial hulks, we saw many bands and artists we knew, and many more that we didn’t. Daisy watched much of the action from a backpack I wore, her little head warm inside a fuzzy purple hat with a red star on top. The highlight Bel and I always hark back to is Machine Gun Fellatio, not least the grand entrance made by singer Christa Hughes. As was her wont, she wore very little. Around her middle, I vaguely remember what might have been a sequinned tourniquet. On her back, a harness holding a battery pack, which was in turn attached to what she wore in place of a bra: a pair of flashing headlights. We figured that as Daisy had spent a bit of her first months of life visiting Moscow nightclubs, this would be a doddle. Unfortunately, she got pneumonia and wound up in hospital. While Bel and I quietly questioned our priorities as parents, Daisy recovered swiftly and was soon zipping up and down the corridor in the children’s ward in a miniature version of the Wiggles’ Big Red Car. Toot-toot chugga-chugga … We had to escalate. And given our propensity for long road trips, our little red Subaru was the place to do it. One of the things I always appreciated about Mum’s and Dad’s respective record collections was that they didn’t organise them into separate genres. They were all mixed up and loved simply because they thought it was good music. A quick rummage around under Mum’s stereo would have had you pulling out Chopin, Neil Diamond, Demis Roussos, the Beach Boys, Julio Iglesias and Brahms. Dad’s might yield Handel, Billie Holiday, the Clancy Brothers, the Rolling Stones, Dave Brubeck, Joan Sutherland, the Red Army Choir, Andy Stewart and Miriam Makeba. Then Mum would give us the live music, coaxing Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’ and Mozart’s ‘Rondo Alla Turka’ from her piano. Between them they covered a decent swathe of Western civilisation. The only hint of a limit came when, after enduring several months of my early efforts on the bagpipes, Mum hinted it might be a nice thing if I try a more sociable instrument. The piano, for instance. Grudgingly, I gave it a go for six weeks, but both the teacher and I knew that I was a lost cause, my heart already well and truly captured by a more barbaric sound. On the vinyl front, Mum took us a daring step forward in 1982 when she bought Michael Jackson’s Thriller. We gathered around the record-player, dazzled by the full-length photo of Jacko reclining in his white suit, tiger cub lolling on his knee. Then Mum lowered the needle into the groove and the room filled with the opening notes of ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin”. Just as when I went to Tosca years later—my first live-opera experience courtesy of a $5 ticket from a scalper outside the Bolshoi—this was one of those stand-out musical moments when the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. What made it even more exciting to me was that it was basically forbidden fruit; my god-fearing primary-school teacher had caught my best mate, Jason, listening to it on his Walkman, accused him of dabbling in the occult and put him on detention. Not that listening to, say, Tchaikovsky was without its perils. When I started high school a couple of years later, we were each invited to volunteer some information about ourselves. I naively let my classmates know that, among other things, I played the bagpipes, was dabbling in the noble art of fencing, and was really very keen on classical music. For the school bullies, I was what you might call a target-rich environment. This was after all a time when a music teacher could recommend we all go to the cinema to see Amadeus, only for one of the school thinkers to put up his hand and say, ‘That sounds pretty gay, miss’. It’s not that it was a school that had no appreciation for artistic endeavour—we put on some stonkingly fine school productions, and only a few of the school thinkers would suggest you were a poof for getting involved. Admittedly, some were in the front row of a matinee performance at the time, but what can you do? And when the first wheelie bins were introduced in the neighbourhood around the school, some of the kids borrowed them and took them to the top of the steep street that descended from just nearby. Once in position, they lay the bins on their sides, climbed in and went tobogganing. It wasn’t an entirely foolhardy endeavour—scouts were positioned further down to make sure no cars were coming, and a bend in the street meant that the curb would act as a natural brake and stop the bins from hurtling across the busy road at the bottom, where they would either get taken out by a car or finish up in the creek beyond. The inaugural race was a piece of performance art that saw bins thumping into the curb and sending their guffawing cargo tumbling across the grass. It was judged a great success. So was the resulting school assembly, which was a masterpiece of unintended comedy as the principal blew a head gasket—a performance that wouldn’t be eclipsed for years until the aftermath of a school swimming carnival at which some enterprising pranksters clogged the pool filter. The core of the assessment of my cohort after that misadventure was: ‘You are the scummiest Year 12 to have ever gone through this school.’ As is traditional in such scenarios, this was much celebrated. As for Jason, the detention came too late to have the intended effect—he ended up a dedicated death-metal fan. Daisy and Leo were exposed to musical instruments pretty much from the beginning—Bel’s piano, my herd of pipes—but I like to think of their first true music academy being our car, a doughty old Subaru that we took out on road trips of ever-escalating ambition. Whether we were zipping north along the Pacific Highway to Bel’s family stronghold of Coffs Harbour or rumbling along endless strips of red in the desert, the kids, safely strapped in and unable to escape, were dosed in our music. They got classical, they got pop. There was funk and rock, there was bluegrass, disco, opera and soul. They got bagpipes and Hungarian fiddles and Russian choirs. They got 1920s jazz and 1980s electronica. They got ska and hip-hop. They even got doses of satirical Balkan folk-rock, because when it came to music, we weren’t going to leave any tone unturned. Once in a while, we took things too far—there’s a CD of Bach played on the piano accordion somewhere in the house, buried deep in a box like nuclear waste—but that just added to the frisson and taught the kids about the hit-and-miss thrill of musical experimentation.

As the Wiggles faded, Leo and Daisy began to request more and more of ‘our’ songs. It turned out that they had eerily perfect recall of lyrics, and there are still times Bel and I dispense with the stereo and let the pair of them sing to us, rolling out the hits like a living jukebox. Johnny Cash was the turning point. Other singers would take his place over the years—Freddie Mercury, Taylor Swift, Lorde, Adele—but Cash was the first superstar of the Subaru Music Academy. For a long time, it was a rare drive that didn’t include a cry of ‘Johnny Cash!’ from the back seat. ‘Jackson’ was sung along to, ‘Hurt’ listened to in solemn reverence. ‘A Boy Named Sue’ was deemed the funniest thing in human history, though what was even funnier occurred the day we arrived at Mum’s and the still-very-young Leo greeted her by bailing her up and bellowing that he was now called Sue. Mum, who was not so familiar with Cash’s work, gave me a puzzled look. The puzzlement deepened a few seconds later when Leo barked out the follow-up line, namely that she was about to meet her doom. The grandest culmination of our time in the car with the Man in Black was surely when Daisy, small enough that her missing front teeth looked adorable rather than an accident, climbed onto a table outside a pub in Tibooburra and started singing ‘Folsom Prison Blues’. I’m saving the video for her twenty-first and am expecting a big reaction and/or the retrospective laying of charges when everyone hears that high little voice describing how she was standing over that freshly smouldering, bulletperforated corpse in Reno. When a little kid has Johnny Cash on board, the next step is clearly world domination. Or in Daisy’s case at least, world salvation.

24 dear malcolm IT WAS A FEW months shy of her eighth birthday that Daisy devised a plan to save the world. The details escape me now, but it involved the recycling of aluminium foil. And lolly wrappers, too, I think, though the foil seemed the most crucial component. With the peculiarly compelling authority small girls wield, she announced that the one person with whom this plan absolutely had to be shared was Malcolm Turnbull. ‘But he’s not prime minister,’ I told her as she wrote it all down in a letter, but she was not interested in such trivia. ‘He’s not even opposition leader,’ I added—it was only a handful of months after he’d been ousted from the job and replaced by Tony Abbott—but she did not care a jot. She’d seen Turnbull on television and she liked the cut of his jib. It was made clear to me that it was my job to deliver the letter to him. And when a seven-year-old girl locks her eyes on yours, the rest of the universe momentarily melts away to leave nothing but a single thought shining with supernova brightness in your brain: You. Cannot. Let. Her. Down. And so it was that I found myself knocking on the member for Wentworth’s door in Parliament House, handing over Daisy’s salvation-through-foil plan to one of his amused staff. As I walked away, I tried to remember what I was doing at Daisy’s age. Surely not much more than picking my nose and concentrating on getting through an entire school day without wetting my pants. (The year before, in kindergarten, my record was two undergarment irrigations in a single day. I still remember Mrs O’Brien’s face slipping from its default expression of gentle encouragement. On the plus side, her cry of ‘He’s done it again!’ provided my father with one of his more cherished running gags for the next three decades.) A fierce pride began to fill my heart. Sure, Daisy’s foil plan was guaranteed not to achieve its desired outcome, and Turnbull’s possession of it was not in itself going to make his colleagues deranged with regret that they’d rolled him for Abbott. But she’d had a vision, aimed high, and gone through with it. And with such unwavering confidence. ‘My daughter,’ I kept thinking. At what stage do you start to live vicariously—at least a little—through your children? When do your own dreams and ambitions start to drop back a couple of notches, edged out bit by bit by your dreams and ambitions for them? I don’t mean totally losing your sight of yourself, just recalibrating. I imagine it’s different for every parent. With Dad, it seemed to happen fairly early on, though he sometimes went on about it in the manner of a jolly martyr. With my mother, it was more a case of HAHAHAHA—as if! So there was a bit of a spectrum there. Anyway, Turnbull was kind enough to ring me a couple of days later. It’s possible he was still smarting so much from the recent loss of the leadership that any sign of support was welcome. ‘How old is Daisy?’ he asked, and I had to break the news to him that she was more than a decade off voting age and, to compound matters, did not reside in his electorate. Undeterred, he went on to write her a perfectly charming letter in which he thoughtfully assessed her plan, praising its attributes and very gently pointing out how it would need to be supplemented by other non-foil-based environment-saving measures. This treasured document was carefully pored over and taken on a triumphant tour of the school. Since then, Daisy’s been busily powering on, Bel and I acting variously as her agents, her roadies, her enablers, her encouragers, her boosters, counsellors and fans. Not always with 100 per cent enthusiasm, it must be admitted, but we soldier on, our curiosity as to how far she will go growing apace with her ambitions. As her little brother also blossoms (give or take his slightly hurtful dream of being kidnapped from his family by talent scouts for FC Barcelona), I find myself thinking more and more about the road they’re on. It’s not that my own future has lost its own thrill, but it’s hard not to get caught up in that energy. Everything is still possible, dreams are untempered by disappointment, and the future shines as brightly as the rays of the morning sun bouncing off one of Daisy’s beloved bits of foil.

25 when the ferry goes out JUST BEFORE WE WENT into the cemetery office, Olivia took the urn filled with Dad’s ashes and was surprised by its heft. ‘He weighs more now than when he was alive,’ she said. After some procrastination on our part, we were ready to hand over what was left of Dad’s physical presence. The cemetery woman couldn’t have been more helpful. ‘Now, would you like to be here for the moment the plaque is placed?’ she asked. It wouldn’t quite be watching a coffin lowered into the earth, but it would do. ‘I’d like that,’ I said. ‘Okay, that’s lovely,’ said the lady, consulting her papers before spelling out an additional fee of a couple of hundred dollars. ‘For what?’ I asked. ‘Attending the plaque placement.’ Olivia and I exchanged glances. It’s amazing how many things, many quite stunningly or at least ornately expensive, you can agree to when you’re half-wild with grief and sitting across the table from a kindly, sympathetic, Kleenex-offering representative of the death industry. But Dad had been dead nearly four years, and a bit of pragmatism had crept in. ‘Look, maybe just let us know when he’s in place.’ Weeks went past, a couple of emails were exchanged over the wording on the plaque. Of greatest importance were the dates; as funny as the cock-up had been with the funeral cards, it didn’t feel right to have a repeat. And there was the quote Dad had loved so dearly from the Seán O’Casey play Juno and the Paycock: ‘I often looked up at the sky an’ assed myself the question— what is the stars, what is the stars?’ And then a letter arrived to let me know the mortal remains of Ian Campbell Jeffrey were now in the ground, parked—as per his wish—next to those of his mother. Thanks to various bits of busyness, I was able to put off going for a week or so without anyone raising an eyebrow. It was handy cover—I kept thinking about Eszter’s words all those years ago about the nothingness when she first saw her dad’s grave, no thought stronger than ‘Oh, that’s my father’s name’. What if I got there and felt nothing? But as I reminded myself, the chances of this were slender. I got on a train and began that most familiar of schleps south, lifting my head only—as I always used to—as we crossed the Georges River just next to where it swallows the Woronora. And suddenly, I was in Sutherland. Leaving the train station, I passed the carpark where Dad had so often waited for me in his car with an undentable patience, no matter how late the hour. If I’d turned the other way, I would have walked past where he used to get such a kick out of pestering whoever the local federal member was. And beyond that, the council chambers where he used to settle into the public gallery each week and make such a nuisance of himself that he was honoured by the local paper as someone who occupied a vital spot on the community spectrum, somewhere between vital gadfly and outright pest. They even got a photo of him walking up the main drag of Sutherland with a look of magnificently implacable grievance on his face; Dad proudly presented me with a clipping of it, which I duly attached to the fridge with a magnet. I laughed every time I got out the milk. I passed the pizza parlour where we used to go, and the bottle shop that had been Dad’s most regular supplier of longnecks. Past the florist, where he went to buy flowers for his mum’s grave. Past the discreet erotic-massage establishment, the very belated discovery of which had scandalised him. ‘You know what’s in that little house near the florist?’ An elegantly timed pause while his voice changed gears to somewhere between melodrama and Old Testament. ‘A brothel!’ This wasn’t strictly accurate, but it didn’t feel like something worth splitting hairs over. I can’t remember if he was moved to bash out one of his characteristically cross but wordy letters to the editor of the local paper, though if he had, it would surely have been one for the ages. I crossed the road and went through the gate, past the sign advising visitors of the free shuttle bus that runs on Wednesdays between the hours of 9 and 2, past a pink bow tie hanging without any further explanation off a bench, past the gentle euphemisms chiselled into marble headstones (‘Fell asleep November 6, aged 74’), past the path where Dad sometimes walked the dog, past the rainbow lorikeets feasting on the bottlebrushes in the soft winter light. Dad always loved lorikeets, and always made a point of stopping to chat at them. Eventually, I reached the little rock garden near where the bush—dense with eucalypts and sandstone overhangs and birds and lizards—spreads briefly before dropping down into the valley where the Woronora River glistens. And there, before our family’s bit of sandstone and Nagyi’s weathered marker, was Dad’s new plaque: ‘What is the stars … ?’ I was oddly pleased to see some Chinese names on one of the nearby markers; Dad had always hankered for Asian neighbours. I sat there for a while, staring at my father’s name and trying to equate him with the great silence that had followed him. As I finally got up to go, I noticed a dog some distance away running along with frenetic aimlessness, then suddenly pausing to cock its leg on a tree. Dad would have liked that. On one of those clear Sydney winter days so flawless it may as well have been gift-wrapped, I went back to Parramatta. Having been to the slab of blond brutalism that now houses the Family Court, I wanted to see the original that had played host to Mum and Dad’s marital finale. Not to mention those little quizzes. ‘We know you love both your parents equally, but …’ After much googling, I couldn’t get any further than that it had been in Parramatta, and that it had been bombed in 1984, the year after my parents’ divorce was signed and sealed. There were black-and-white newspaper photos of the building’s facade in the wake of the explosion. I tried to discern details of the little bit of building you could see above the rubble, and subsequently spent a happy but fruitless hour wandering the Parramatta central business district, looking for brick buildings drab enough to fit the bill. As so often happens when I hit a brick wall (but in this case, not the right one), I was rescued by my friend Stephen Murray. Eerily knowledgeable and possibly omniscient, he is like Google from the distant future. Not only did he immediately give me the address, he also sent me the parliamentary committee report recommending that the Family Court up stumps and move into a purpose-built building. Thus armed, I returned to the scene. The sun warmed my back as I walked along the riverbank, watching ducks and moorhens paddle about in the malt-coloured water above shoals of carp the size of Bruce the shark. I was asking myself just what it was I was expecting from this little expedition when I first saw it: eight storeys of nondescript brick, with one side daringly bereft of windows and instead decorated with a pattern of vertical grey slits. I stepped into the foyer and saw the two lifts that had been so derided in that report all those years ago. I stepped in one and punched the button for the top floor. The lift was relatively new, but it travelled in the same old shaft. And it was small, at least when you consider all the emotionally damaged traffic that used to go through there on a daily basis. I tried to imagine us squeezed into that space. I tried to imagine all the children and fractured parents, and the magistrates and lawyers and counsellors they sometimes shared the ride with. I stepped out for a moment on the top floor, said ‘Fuck this’ for the benefit of

no one but me, and jumped back in the lift. The other half of the ground floor is occupied by a cafe now. As I stepped in, I was struck by the sheer number of motivational signs—it was as if they were still trying to exorcise the bad spirits of the place. There was one painted onto a chopping board: ‘A pinch of patience, a spoonful of laughter and a heap of love’. And on a shelf behind the counter: ‘Love is the most powerful of all we have been given’. And rather pointedly: ‘Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards’. And, as the desiccated coconut on the lamington, this: ‘Eight rules for a better life. 1. Never hate. 2. Don’t worry. 3. Live simply. 4. Expect a little. 5. Give a lot. 6. Always smile. 7. Live with love. 8. Best of all, be with God’. As I queued for takeaway quiche, I thought about Mum’s relationship with God and smiled as I stepped up to the counter and ordered. But as I stood to one side waiting for my coffee, the building went to work on me. I don’t normally wear sunglasses indoors, but I did this time and I was glad. It just welled up, unstoppably. I felt foolish, crying like an idiot behind my Ray-Bans, hoping no one would ask me any questions, like ‘Would you like sugar?’ The young barista called to me. I tidied up as best I could with my hankie, took the paper cup and blurted out, ‘Bless your heart’. He looked a little taken aback. Normally, it’s just a ‘Thank you’. The ferry to Circular Quay was pulling in at the wharf below like a getaway car and I ran down the stairs to make sure I caught it. As I settled onto a bench on the foredeck, I looked back at that building one more time, then turned my eyes to the river ahead and kept them there. A German-speaking family sat on the bench in front of me, a couple with their young son between them. As we began making our way down the river the boy was, in the way small children are, infectiously excited about everything on which his eyes alighted: pelicans, mangrove trees, trains clattering across bridges, cranes swivelling atop partially built apartment blocks, and snake-necked darters popping out of the water, fresh from their fish-slaughtering escapades. The mother and father both delighted in him but, in that moment at least, not each other. I don’t understand German, but I could feel the terse electricity crackling between them. As he spoke, she responded less and less, and eventually he got up, murmured something at her and stalked inside. The son put his head on her shoulder and gently rubbed her back, his hand moving in slow circles. She put her head on his. As the waterway broadened from river to harbour, the tops of the city towers began to appear in the distance. Above us was a white-bellied sea eagle that had travelled this far in from the coast only to pick up a harassing party of crows for its troubles. It finally shook off its tormentors and as the last of the crows wheeled away, cawing in triumph to its comrades, the eagle stopped flapping and soared past, its gigantic wings a picture of perfect stillness. Eventually, we came in under the Harbour Bridge and turned in to Circular Quay, engine rumbling as we passed the Overseas Passenger Terminal where we’d arrived so many decades earlier, a fresh chapter ready to be written, the light so bright in all our eyes.

26 friendship’s twilight THERE ARE PLENTY OF fun meditations on the business of putting words on a page. ‘Writing is easy,’ said Douglas Adams. ‘You only need to stare at a blank piece of paper until your forehead bleeds.’ Which was itself a riff on Ernest Hemingway. Oscar Wilde had his famous comma, which he spent all morning taking out, then following a period of careful reflection, spent the afternoon putting back in. Nikolai Gogol used to hit up his mate Alexander Pushkin for ideas before he got rolling. Virginia Woolf, for her part, compared it with sex: ‘First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.’ But for mine, one of the most sensible tips was from Kurt Vonnegut: ‘Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.’ One of humanity’s oldest and most incontrovertible laws is that there’s no pleasing everyone. Should anyone ever need reminding, the comments sections under online stories are doing a sterling job. So I listened to Vonnegut. For me, that one person was Mark Colvin—journalist, broadcaster, writer, Twitter fiend, outstanding human being and, in a twist of fate I still pinch myself over, dear friend. I never told him he was my target audience, though I suspect he figured it out, judging by the regularity with which I brought words to him for blessing. Sometimes he issued a judgment on the entire piece, sometimes he’d single out a line or two that had stood out for him. He might gently suggest the removal of an errant comma, though unlike Wilde he was never in the business of putting it back in. Then once in a while, he caught me completely off guard. After the last of my Home Truths columns was published (included here as the next chapter), he dropped me a line late that evening that stopped me in my tracks: ‘I hope Bel is suitably appreciative of what between the lines is one of the great love-letters of all time.’ That was one of the things about Mark—he missed nothing. Our friendship was only a few years old, but it had been a rapid and thorough interlocking, one of those connections that felt a whole lot older than it was. As a mutual friend said to me when it was all over, ‘It was like speed-dating with you two’. The end started innocuously with a short text from him on 21 March 2017: ‘Guess where I am? Hint: crap food and beeping noises.’ I wish I’d had the presence of mind to reply, ‘Are you at a rave, Mark?’ But I didn’t. I was too appalled that his bad luck—a malignantly, indefatigably attentive force—was refusing to take a break. Hospital stays were such a part of Mark’s life over the couple of decades he’d spent as a walking, talking medical curiosity. For God’s sake, he’d only just come out of a tussle with a cancer that had set up camp on that generously proportioned head of his. That he was already being sucked back in to the hospital system just felt like bad luck being lifted one notch higher into the perverse. But one of the many lessons Mark taught by example was the importance of taking things in one’s stride. I saw him falter only once, and that was the afternoon he spelled out the hard reality of his diagnosis. I never imagined the time would come when I found myself wishing a friend had pleurisy—one of the initial but wrong guesses as to what was troubling his lungs—but here we were. His days in hospital stretched into weeks, and the secret of how drastically bad things were for Mark was hermetically sealed inside a group of friends I thought of as the Circle of Colvin. Yet there was hope, and radiation. One time I popped by at the appointed time but found his bed empty. He texted an apology, explaining that his radiation session had hit some complication and he was running late. He sent this text from inside the radiation room. The next time we spoke, I suggested to him that it might be a good idea if he never apologised to me again. One of the times Bel and I visited, I brought news of Mum’s Gumtree real-estate success. Mark brightened. ‘I love stories about James’s Mum,’ he told Bel, a look of impish glee on his face. And he totally did. Even a throwaway line could delight him. At the start of the year, we’d fallen briefly into a texted conversation about my father and the miracle of how of all Mum’s marriages, theirs had been the longest. ‘In which order did she marry them?’ Mark asked. ‘Was he her first?’ ‘Dad was second,’ I replied. ‘No. 1 and No. 3 were Magyars—lack of language barrier probably made everything more efficient.’ ‘Efficiency. Your mum. Not concepts I’d previously paired in my mind.’ ‘You should see her smoking.’ ‘HAHAHAHA 2017 is already better than 2016.’ It was one of the rare occasions Mark jumped the gun. On 11 May, less than two months after the text about crap food and beeping noises, he died. I was far away, working in Parliament House. I’d known for two days that things had turned south on him, but I thought there was still time left and had made plans to visit him the following day. A phone call from our mutual friend Leigh Sales put an end to that. Inasmuch as I can pull a positive out of that moment, it was that I was with a friend (and occasional musical partner), Labor MP Terri Butler. Terri whisked me straight out of there—a relatively public part of the building—and hid me in her office, where she proceeded to pour a morning martini into me while I went wild with grief. When I finally emerged, I was lucky to pour myself into writing something about—and for—my friend. This: I must have walked a million miles in my local Bunnings—because of Mark Colvin. It’s like he could sense when I was in there and therefore free to chat. It tended to be in the doldrums of a Sunday afternoon and my phone would buzz in my pocket—something important or trivial or amusing or splendidly random had crossed his mind, and he had to share it. ‘Hello mate,’ he’d say, and we’d be off. I’d give up any pretence of looking for what I’d come for and would meander up and down the aisles, trolley in one hand, phone in the other. And it was glorious. Sometimes it was serious, sometimes not, sometimes both. I’d always pick up new knowledge and, as if to keep things in balance, lose a bit of hearing as his laugh boomed in my ear. Our conversation sometimes wandered the world or history, sometimes stayed very local. Sometimes we dug deep, sometimes skated happily across the surface. Then eventually, we’d say goodbye—and suddenly I’d realise I was still in Bunnings. I first met Mark briefly at some event, but it was on Twitter—that corner of the internet that feels like it was designed with him in mind—that our paths truly began to cross. I was in awe of him, so I was beside myself when he took a shine to my writing. We met at a cafe around the corner from his house and we never looked back. A love of words brought us together, but there was so much we revelled in: Eastern Europe, Iran, comedy, music, good writing and, with almost equal enthusiasm, bad writing. (Just last weekend he was eager to alert me to the latest output of one scribe who regularly baffled us into a state of hysterical disbelief. His text contained just one word: the writer’s surname.) Many were on the receiving end of Mark’s magic, and Twitter expanded his reach. He was so generous—not least

with young journalists—and he’d sweep up everyone in his enthusiasm, his wisdom, his great tidal waves of encouragement. Sometimes I loved just listening to him. I mean, that voice. One of the joys of life was hearing that velvet instrument used to produce swear words—something he did with joyful abandon and creativity in the right company. And he was always keen to improve himself even in this area. I have a small collection of Mark’s messages to me that begin, ‘As a connoisseur of invective I thought you’d enjoy …’ But sometimes they’d arrive in my inbox unannounced—for example, an article celebrating words such as ‘arsegiblets’ and ‘mingebulb’. I’d send stuff back and we’d fall into a cycle of escalation. Eventually he might ring, roaring with laughter. Sometimes, he was just keen to create a mental image. Once he noted with pleasure he’d seen a particular person smiling—‘First time I’ve seen her not look like someone had recently shoved a cheesegrater up her arse’. Mark may have been a man of profound depths, but boy was he gleeful splashing through the shallows. Then, just after another round of silliness, he’d turn around and give you what felt like half the universe. When he asked me to read some chapters of the manuscript that became his memoir Light and Shadow, I lost myself in a bigger world. His. He was brave, he was stoic. Injustice and hypocrisy made him angry. A bowl of fresh raspberries sorted him out. As did his special place in the water. Last Christmas he texted from his mother’s place in the country: ‘Here the dam is full and I swim around the island in the evening. Bucolic peace.’ Mark loved my family, and even extended that affection to our pets. He was very much a dog person (I keep thinking about his boxer, Chops, waiting for the boss to come home), but he got his hands on one of my pythons and looked like a happy little boy. He was one of the finest people I’ve ever known, and becoming his friend has been one of the great joys of my life. He left one last tweet to be sent out once he was gone: ‘It’s all been bloody marvellous.’ But for now, I’m clinging to the last message he sent me. It was on Wednesday and I promised to come see him the moment I got back to Sydney. He replied with the simplest expression of love: ‘XXXX’. Those words appeared in the paper the following day. It was Friday, the first day without Mark in the world, the day I’d been meant to go back and talk with him about big things, little things and utter bollocks. Instead, Bel and I gathered with others from the Circle of Colvin in a pub near his house. His photo was parked on the table with its own gin and tonic, which bubbled away miraculously for hours. We laughed and cried and read aloud choice quotes from that columnist, whose latest output had —as if by miracle—dropped a day early. During a couple of the more egregious paragraphs, I turned Mark’s face away. That little informal wake helped us all. But as I wobbled out into the night afterwards, I wondered: who’d be my reader now? Mark was keen on Vonnegut’s wisdom. Some of it was shared as a reading at his funeral. As we all sat there, still thunderstruck, eyes locked on the wicker coffin that was the final expression of his desire not to cause a fuss, the sadness was softened for a moment by one of Vonnegut’s great conclusions: ‘I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anyone tell you different.’

27 ticking, tocking ONE OF THE SHORTEST poems in the English language is ‘Fleas’. Its author is unknown, but whoever it was, they nailed down the whole thing in just nine letters and four syllables: ‘Adam/ Had ’em.’ This only just pips Ogden Nash’s five-syllable herbal manifesto relegating parsley to the realm of the ‘gharsley’. Taking its place among them is my favourite of the miniature masterpieces, Dorothy Parker’s meditation on life’s starkest equation: ‘Time doth flit/Oh, shit.’ Parker’s couplet was on my mind a lot a few years ago when I was about to turn forty. Looking back now, I wonder why I was so terrified. My original plan was to run away to the desert until the whole thing had blown over. This struck me as an eminently sensible course of action, but Bel was having none of it. ‘You’re going to have a party and you’re going to have fun,’ she said so firmly that I wondered for a moment whether she might in a previous life have been a gulag guard. She was right, of course. It was a great night and, as my friends Dick and Christa Hughes performed a touchingly defamatory version of ‘St James Infirmary Blues’, I looked across the faces of everyone gathered there for me and arrived at the conclusion that there was nothing more marvellous than turning forty. Time flits, and as every year I live represents a smaller proportion of my time alive, it feels like it’s starting to flit with a speed that is most unbecoming. But, for the time being at least, I’ve stopped wanting to pause it. I certainly wouldn’t want to turn back the clock. That would mean having to hand back what time has handed me along the way, not least the cushion of experience. That and a sense of distance between me and my early twenties, a time when my chief regret was that time wasn’t flitting anywhere near fast enough. If there was a fitting theme for that period it was Parker’s slightly longer verse, ‘Résumé’, which blackly dismisses a range of suicide methods to arrive at history’s most halfhearted reason to keep living. Somehow I stumbled out of that and into the great blossoming of love. Live, try to learn. Time flits on, giving and taking as it goes. Faces that were there at the beginning of my existence and felt like a permanent part of life have gone into the great forever. Names that were the cement of my life are now spelled out in stone. Aunt Joli, the greatest chatterbox I have ever known, is in a silent corner of a cemetery where the squirrels are as active as her jaw once was. My Aunt Liz, who I was always sure was destined to crack a century with her smile intact, is a scattering of ash long since dissolved into the soil of her beloved Scotland. Dad, who used to phone me incessantly like it was an Olympic sport with a million heats, stays on my mobile as a number I never hear from any more. Then I think back to just a couple of years ago when my cancer-wasted cousin Andris hugged me farewell. ‘You’re a good kid,’ he said. He was only a couple of years older than me, the cheeky bastard. But for a moment, decades fell away and I was with him throwing stones into the Danube, him so much taller than me I thought of him as a grown-up. Friends I sang with, friends I drank with, friends I talked and laughed and swore with—gone, yet I hear them still, their voices never fading. They are all part of that shifting collection of experience, mistakes, successes, quirks and genetic hardwiring I think of as me. As my children Daisy and Leo grow up, I like to think that, in a way, they’re getting some of that love and magic from even those they barely knew—all part of the great continuum. Bel and I still tiptoe into their bedrooms at night to watch them sleeping, just like we did when they were babies. I stand there with my heart full, every year I’ve had with them locked in there like treasure. Then I think back to my early twenties, when the nights were darker than anything, and marvel at how it all seems to add up eventually. Time doth flit, but I’m going with the flow.

après mum, le déluge MUM LASTED ONLY A few months in her new house. Following the whirlwind of the Gumtree sale and the move north, discontentment came quickly. As Laszlo began emailing photos of her sitting on the porch of her new house supervising the removalists, you could see the eyes narrowed with doubt behind her nicotine cloud. Doubt soon hardened into something firmer. ‘I hate it,’ she said with such feeling, each syllable was like the prong of a trident. She began to talk more frequently of wanting to move. I was confident it would peter out, but I was wrong. With an efficiency that would have dazzled and pleased Mark Colvin in equal measure, a new house was found and plans were soon under way for her to move again. It was a much shorter move—only half an hour’s drive away. Just three months after she’d moved up from Sydney, it was done. ‘I was in the last place for twenty-three years,’ she reasoned. ‘It evens out.’ The new house, she keeps reminding me happily as if she were a hardcore jetsetter, is handy to the airport. Furthermore, it’s just three minutes to Coles. ‘Are you happy?’ I asked her on the phone. She was limbering up for another Coles trip, her heart humming with the thought of pushing a trolley up those gleaming aisles like a Viking with a slightly wonky longship, every shelf another defenceless village ripe for pillaging. And for once, her answer arrived quickly and without qualification. ‘Yes.’ And that is where this story was meant to end. It certainly did when I first handed in the manuscript that would become this book. Life had other plans. Mum had just made her morning cup of tea in her new kitchen when the first heart attack hit. ‘This is it!’ she suddenly announced to Olivia, who was visiting from Perth. It wasn’t quite it. Not yet. A short ambulance ride later, she was shamelessly fibbing to the doctors about how she was feeling much better now. She so wanted to go home. But even then she didn’t lose sight of the practical. Her house was closer to the hospital than it was to Coles, and she harangued Olivia and Laszlo to go there and eat the pot of bean stew she’d cooked. It wasn’t going to eat itself! It’s a special form of agony now to think about how I didn’t fly up there and then. She seemed to be okay. The plan was clear. I’d go up later in the week once she was home. I’d chat to her on the phone that evening after she’d rested a bit. We’d make another cuppa and talk about the usual stuff. We’d all had a bit of a scare, but everything was going to be all right. The second heart attack came late in the afternoon, and Mum’s talking days were done. By the time I tumbled off the plane and raced into the hospital with Laszlo, she was in an induced coma, filled with tubes and attached to a bank of machines that dwarfed even her love of gadgets. There were conversations with nurses and doctors, their faces gentle but sombre. There was talk of a ruptured aorta and the need to put her in a helicopter and fly her to Newcastle, some 380 kilometres to the south. The coming surgery was too big a job to do locally. In the small dark hours of the morning, I stood on the front lawn of the house I’d never seen Mum in and watched across the treetops as the helicopter lifted her into the Milky Way with a great rhythmic thudding and a flashing of red tail-light. I have rarely felt so strange as I did in that moment watching my mother disappearing above me into the night. Suddenly Newcastle became the centre of our brittle new universe, the days a blur of fluorescent light, cheap motel rooms and the freeway from Sydney humming beneath the tyres. There were faint flickers of responsiveness as Mum managed—with what was obviously a lot of effort—to part her eyelids. There were days of nothing. There were days so sad the only thing that made sense to me was to head down to the ocean bath close to midnight and float in the salt water with a beer and wonder about it all. There were days of false hope, which were at once the best and the worst of them all. Over the coming days, there were times I wondered whether it would have been better for Mum if Olivia hadn’t been there, but I kept coming back to the same conclusion: she would have hated to have died like that, alone on her kitchen floor. At least as she lay there over those eighteen days—attached to all her machines, suddenly so small without her voice—she had us. We were all there. Her grandchildren—Daisy, Leo, and Olivia’s daughter, Claudia—spent time with her, holding her hand and talking. As did her last remaining sibling, Pali, who came down from Brisbane with his wife, Zsuzsa. And of course there were Laszlo, Eszter, Olivia and me—the four of us together for the first time in years. All of us together, all of us alone in our sadness. And then, inevitably, we were gathered into a small, windowless room filled with chairs and adorned with a small table upon which stood a box of tissues and a vase of plastic flowers. The colour scheme reminded me of the motel I’d been staying in. Mum’s adventure, we were told, was nearly done. Flanked by a social worker and the nurse who was on Mum duty that shift, one of the cardiac surgeons prepared us for the end. He somehow managed to be gently blunt, which was probably just what we needed. Mum got in one final episode of The Bold and the Beautiful, one more episode of A Current Affair. And as the respirator was switched off, the voice of her beloved David Attenborough drifted down from the television like a benediction. It was quick, it was gentle. All four of us held her, and she looked relieved as she went. The nurse came, listened through his stethoscope and told us what we already knew. ‘She’s gone.’ A strange sensation came over us, a warmth that filled the room and lingered for a few minutes. Then it dissipated for good. Such a tranquil departure, it must be said, was not in keeping with Mum’s character, so I was relieved when her funeral made up for it. But ahead of the big day, we had to return to the house that had brought her fleeting happiness. Her smoking seat was still waiting for her in the little Chinese-themed garden she’d designated her nicotine spot. Her TV guide was still on the armrest of her chair, opened to the night before she collapsed. And there were little mysteries she’d left for us to puzzle over. How, for example, had she managed to move twice in the space of a few months, buy a new fridge in the process, and still have stuff in there that expired in 2011? We’ll never know. There were more pressing issues on the day we were due to bury her. The rain had arrived and it was so torrential it felt like there was barely any air between the drops. More pressingly, the hearse had been flooded into its garage. The undertakers wanted to postpone until Monday, which wasn’t going to work. Even if we had to wade through the water, carry her out and pop her in the back of a Bunnings ute, we had to go ahead. ‘Mum loved a Bunnings trip,’ Laszlo mentioned in passing. Luckily, the drains were cleared and the hearse made it to the cemetery on time. Even in the photo of her that stood before the coffin’s head, she was wielding a cigarette. Under a low grey sky punctuated only by a pair of black cockatoos and the odd, distant tremble of thunder, we carried Mum to her final resting place. From a little ghetto-blaster in the back of the hearse, a sad, yearning voice and a keening violin drifted out into the now-soft rain as we stared at the coffin from beneath our umbrellas, grappling uselessly with the idea that a mere box could contain such a force of nature. All those passions, all those wild enthusiasms, all those exuberant resentments, now enclosed in polished timber. For a moment, Mum was nowhere and everywhere. Soon, we would leave her here in the wet earth, beneath her mountain of red and white roses and a solitary, rain-soaked

cigarette, and we’d go back to her house—exactly the sort of family gathering she’d been dreaming would happen in her new home once she’d settled in. But first, we had to lay those roses upon the preposterously little coffin lid. By then, the music had switched to ‘Für Elise’, a trusty bit of Beethoven Mum had always loved playing on her piano, an instrument so innocent of the tuner’s hand it had long sounded like it was under water. As we lined up with our solitary blooms, the celebrant turned to us all and murmured, ‘If anyone would like to share a memory of Eszter, please do’. Without skipping a beat, the sky exploded. It was one of those thunderclaps that felt like it had pounded our eardrums so deep into our skulls they’d bounced off each other. Once we were confident no one had been hit by lightning, we all laughed. In that carnival of grief, it was even more than a moment of release—it was almost magical. More than anything, we understood that there couldn’t have been a more Mum way to say goodbye. Well, either that or a shower of cigarettes.