Sitting up late, the house gradually cooling after another baking Melbourne day, Annette passes me a photograph of a cute-looking little brown-eyed munchkin of the 1970s, Chris smiling away under his bowl haircut.
‘When did it start?’
‘Trouble?’ She leans back in her chair. ‘Chris was always mischievous, always a daredevil, always playing pranks.’ Annette talks about his endless wild feats of climbing and jumping, of go-go-going on bikes and whatever else was at hand to ride or play faster and harder and longer than anyone else; his athletic skills, his irrepressible humour, his pranking her with dead snakes and his Mother’s Day present of a dead mouse.
Annette’s second son, Barry, was and is very different, she says – thoughtful, considerate, more cautious – and as a result often found it hard living in the wake of his headstrong older brother.
Yet, sometimes he got dragged in. ‘There’s a photo of them somewhere here,’ she says, leafing through the albums. ‘They’re holding a bag of herbs, making out it’s marijuana and I was shocked. I hit the roof and had a go at Chris about that photo, and he told me it was just parsley or something and they were trying to make it look like marijuana. They had me going, the little horrors.’
Funnily enough, Chris has mentioned this very incident to me.
‘It was marijuana,’ I say.
‘No it wasn’t,’ Annette says. ‘It was parsley or something that they made out to look like marijuana for the photo. “Mum,” Chris said to me. “It was only herbs; we were only stooging you.”’
‘That’s what they told everybody,’ I say. ‘Chris said he thought it would be daring to pose with mari –’
‘He was just trying to stir me up.’
*
I ask if she can track Chris’ wildness back to any particular time.
She thinks for a while. ‘Chris was an early developer: couldn’t keep him in a bassinet – any chance he got he’d be out and into everything. He walked at nine months. There was never any containing Chris.’
‘What about crime, though? When’s the first time you remember him doing something like stealing?’
Her laugh turns into a cough which she bites back.
‘When Chris was about four and Barry was still in a pram, I was in the supermarket with them. I turn around and here’s Chris, aged four, stuffing a Little Golden Book under his shirt. I smacked him. You wouldn’t think a 4-year-old would think like that, would you?’