eople outside the area gave you funny looks when you told them you lived in Barringa East. Mum had never stayed married long enough to save up for a house elsewhere. She received a social-security pension, and also a wage from her part-time job as a barmaid, but she didn’t tell the government about that in case she lost her pension. Which meant that she was lying to them, even though she was always going mad at me for lying, except in my case I thought of it as decorating statements to make them sound more interesting.

Besides me in our family, there was my big brother, Harley and my two sisters, Valjoy and Jedda. (Mum had a weird taste in names.) Harley left school two years ago. He’d been looking for a job ever since, only he didn’t really look all that hard.

‘How come they haven’t found you a job yet down at that Commonwealth Employment Office?’ Mum demanded. ‘What did you tell them, that you were an out-of-work admiral, or a taxidermist, for heaven’s sake! What about that telegram they sent on Monday?’

‘I went out for the interview,’ said Harley, sly as a swagman’s kelpie.

‘So what happened?’

‘My foot stuck in this grating thing by the factory door, and they had to find a metal cutter. And by that time a hundred other kids queued up and got interviewed.’

‘Let’s see the bruise, then.’

‘Haven’t got one. It was an old bit of grating all covered in soft moss.’

Harley liked loafing in his hammock studying books about astral projection. That means you can make your spirit leave your physical body and move around without anyone knowing. Harley had this idea that if he could train himself to do that, he might be able to get a really interesting highly paid job as a spy or detective. And he wouldn’t have to leave his hammock to go to work, either.

Mum said it was a lot of creepy nonsense, and who in their right mind would want to leave their bodies and float around like wisps of smoke? There wasn’t anything smoky about Mum. She really enjoyed being alive, and getting dressed up to go out. She went to Bingo nights, and dances, and Tupperware parties, and Parents Without Partners, which was where she met Lennie, who was her new boyfriend. Valjoy said she had a nerve joining Parents Without Partners when she’d already had two partners and a whole lot of boyfriends as well.

Valjoy was named after Mum’s two sisters, but she hated them both because they were always telling Mum if they saw her hanging around the pizza parlour with any of the Eastside Boys. She said she wished her name was Danielle or Monique, but the crowd she hung round with didn’t ever call each other by their proper names, anyhow. Everyone in that crowd wore black T-shirts, with their nicknames on the front in iron-on vinyl letters. They all had names like Spook, Blonk, Dagger, Scum, Dracula and Titch, and Valjoy’s nickname in that crowd was Curves.

Mum went mad every time Valjoy wore that black T-shirt saying Curves, but Valjoy had a worse one hidden away, which she sneaked out for parties. It had ‘I can be very, very friendly’ written across the front.

Valjoy was fifteen and still at Tech but she was planning to leave at the end of the year and become a motor mechanic or a boilermaker. She said it was dumb to go into an office job where you’d only meet hundreds of other girls. You’d have more fun if you were, for instance, the only girl driving a crane with a firm that employed twenty other crane drivers, all fellers.

Valjoy was sort of boy mad.

Then there was my little sister, Jedda. Jedda was sort of horse mad. Although she was already six, she went round wearing a tail made out of plaited pantyhose pinned to the back of her jeans. She was utterly embarrassing, and I had to share a bedroom with her. She made stables out of the furniture on her side of the room and slept in them instead of in her proper bed. She ate in there, too, which I didn’t think was very hygienic. There was always a long line of ants parading across the bedroom floor after Jedda’s leftover jam sandwiches and soggy cornflakes, but Mum never ticked her off about it.

Valjoy wouldn’t let me in her room and I wouldn’t have wanted to share a room with her, anyway. When she was in a bad mood, it was like being with a dangerous animal with a thorn in its paw. Also, she learned martial arts, another way she figured she might meet boys, but she said it was a real letdown, because that karate centre was full of nice polite Asian university students who were so brainy she couldn’t understand what they were talking about. I was careful not to annoy her since she started learning martial arts. She said she knew how to paralyse people for life, just by using her elbow.

As though our house wasn’t already small and noisy enough, Lennie was always dropping in for meals. He had this great, clanging, bumper-bar voice. Every time he came out with some unfunny remark, which I personally thought more polite to pretend he never said, Mum would shriek and fall about laughing.

It was always bedlam at our house. Valjoy was forever slamming out of the front door hollering that she was going, this time for good, and not to expect her home ever again. And Mum would yell after her that it was the best news she’d heard since she won the fridge in the football-club raffle and good riddance – only she didn’t ever mean it. And in the background Jedda would be whinnying or watching the TV racing results with the sound turned up full blast. She knew all the names of racehorses and their trainers. I didn’t think it was very elegant at all that a little kid understood how the TAB betting system worked, but Mum and Lennie egged her on.

‘Call a race for us, love,’ Mum would say, and Jedda would start chanting, ‘Irish Mist getting a clear run on the rails, followed by Uranus, King Herod sneaking up on the outside, followed by Percy Boy, followed by Champagne Charley, with Sky’s the Limit and Take a Gamble well back in the field . . .’

Yet our house wasn’t as unrefined as some of the others in the street. As a matter of fact, we had some pretty peculiar neighbours. Nobody sat in judgement over anyone else in Barringa East because they had too many skeletons in their own cupboards.

Mrs Pegg next door had a lot of travelling expenses. She had to visit her son Terry who was in a home in the country for uncontrollable teenagers because he liked driving. He didn’t have a licence or a car of his own, so he borrowed other people’s without asking. The first time he did that, they let him out under the supervision of a parole officer, but he borrowed the parole officer’s VW without asking and drove off to Perth.

The family on the other side of us were threatened with eviction because they didn’t pay the rent. They nailed boards across the windows and doors and barricaded themselves in with a supply of tinned food. It was even exciting for a while, seeing who would win, but Mum felt sorry for Mrs MacMahon and went down to the real-estate office and paid all the back rent out of the $300 she’d saved up for a fur coat.

‘You’re crazy,’ Valjoy said. ‘She’ll never pay it back. And what if social security finds out you had all that money stashed away for a fur coat? Pensioners aren’t supposed to go around wearing fur coats. One day you’ll get sprung about that hotel job.’

‘I’ll worry about that when it happens,’ said Mum. ‘Lennie said he’d buy me a fur, anyhow, the day I make up my mind to marry him. What kind do you reckon, Valjoy? That pale goldy-colour fur, or dark, or something really eye-catching, like red fox?’

That was the only time she and Valjoy ever had nice quiet conversations, when they discussed clothes that hadn’t been bought yet.

Barringa East was a messy patchwork sort of place. The people who actually owned their houses had done them up nicely with sunblinds and gardens, and the ones who had moved out from high-rise flats usually went to a lot of trouble, too, because they were so glad to move into a place with a front and back yard. But a lot of no-hopers also lived in Barringa East, and it was depressing walking along some of those streets past houses that looked like decaying fruit. They had newspapers pasted up instead of curtains; waist-high weeds for a garden, and skinny bitzer dogs guarding nothing. And the driveways were full of old cars that had died.

Barringa East wasn’t very large. You could walk from one end of it to the other in twenty minutes, even allowing for detours to avoid Barry Hollis who was usually out hunting for someone to pick on. On all four sides of Barringa East there was a main road, as though it had been set on purpose into a frame. It was really peculiar. Outside the frame were the smart suburbs, with new brick houses and double garages holding shiny big cars and speedboats on trailers.

Those suburbs had their own schools and they weren’t a bit like Barringa East Primary. Sometimes, only not very often because we weren’t invited all that much, our netball and football teams played theirs. Their kids didn’t yell and swear at the umpire like the kids in our teams, or turn round and beat each other up for missing the ball.

Our local paper was always printing news items about those schools. There’d be photographs with cap­tions underneath: ‘Gilland Primary School raised $200 for the Seeing Eye Dog Centre by making and selling pottery.’ ‘Edgeworth Primary had a most exciting day coming to school dressed as their favourite book characters.’ ‘Four students from Jacana Heights Primary have won scholarships to Bloggs Grammar School and Moggs Ladies College’.

The only time I remember our school being mentioned in that paper was when the classrooms burned down and the heading was ‘Arson Suspected at Barringa East Primary’.

But while I was in sixth grade, they built a new freeway – and one of the roads that was part of the framework for keeping Barringa East in its place was divided. This little section of Hedge End Road, only three or four houses long, suddenly found itself plonked officially onto the end of Barringa East, like a satin rosette stuck on a packet of fish and chips. And the school zoning system meant that anyone who lived in that cut-off bit of Hedge End Road had to send their kids to Barringa East Primary School.

However, there wasn’t a great rush of new enrolments to our school. Maybe the owners of those big houses became rich by not having kids, or maybe they felt so disgusted at being officially part of Barringa East that they moved.

But there was one kid, Alison Ashley, and she started at Barringa East Primary two weeks after the beginning of first term. Maybe it took her parents a whole fortnight to recover from the shock that she had to come to our crummy school. But when she did arrive, because no one was sitting next to me, Miss Belmont put Alison Ashley there.

And from the first day I hated her.