1970. I’m four, five maybe, depending on the time of year, when the Thames River breaks its banks. Dark, heavy water flows up the street and under the front door of our semi-detached rental outside of London. The gap under the front door is just a slit and I don’t understand how the water keeps getting in. The house is filling up. We watch from the stairs as the television floats down the hallway. We retreat to the upstairs bedroom; helicopters hover overhead. Neighbours pass food to each other from their bedroom windows with buckets threaded over broom handles. It is the most thrilling thing that has ever happened to me. The warfare between my parents has momentarily halted and I’d like us to all stay here forever, camping on the double bed, eating biscuits, reading comics, listening to the rabbit chewing through its cardboard box in the wardrobe and breathing in the smell of each other’s unwashed hair.
But within a few days the water recedes. My father stays home from work to help with the clean up and that’s what he’s meant to be doing one morning as I turn the handle on the garden shed and see him, his trousers around his ankles, wrestling with Mrs Whitley from next door on the sack of hay I use to line the rabbit’s hutch.
I don’t understand why the dark tide line on the wallpaper in the lounge room is so far above the height at which the floodwaters reached inside the house. I think my parents are lying to me about the water—I think it must have come up fast and fierce during the night while I was sleeping. I think they are hiding something from me; something I’m not meant to know.
There’s a gap here—memory is like that. It erases the vast boredom of childhood. Years go by unremembered, unrecounted, but then minutes will compress and haunt you for the rest of your life.
1975. We’ve migrated to Western Australia. We live on a bush block on the outskirts of Perth. My father has left his job and while my mother works we are attempting to live ‘the good life’. But my father doesn’t renovate the shed we live in, or grow food or tend to the animals like he’s meant to. He’s busy having an affair with the wife of the local vet. I don’t know this at the time. I’m ten. But I know that she rides up the driveway of our house one hot Saturday afternoon on a racehorse wearing jodhpurs and a bikini top. The horse is black with white socks and a broad slash of white down its nose like spilled milk, there is sweat in little ridge lines on its neck and white foaming sweat on the inside of its thighs. Another woman is there too, on another horse, a friend of the bikini woman, but I can’t remember a thing about her.
My father comes out of the house to greet the two horsewomen. He holds the reins of the black horse and looks up at his bikini woman. He runs his hands down the horse’s hot, muscular neck. The horse paws at the dirt. The metal of its shoe makes a sharp, dangerous sound against the gravel.
My mother stands and watches from the kitchen window. I can see the line of her mouth thin-lipped in what—anger, humiliation, shame? A part of me understands what is happening here, but another part of me doesn’t. I remember thinking it was rude of my mother to not come out of the house and greet the young women. And I didn’t understand how she could resist the excitement of the horses.
1980. My father has been gone a few years now. He’s made a new life for himself in Sydney with a young Filipino woman. He has a red sports car. There’s not much news but an occasional photograph of him arrives with the harbour in the background—sailboats bobbing around his ears.
Just before Christmas a bush fire threatens our run-down timber cottage on the outskirts of Perth. I watch the television news with my mother and my brother. The air is sweet with smoke and loud with the sound of the Channel Nine helicopter flying overhead. It’s like being in our very own episode of MASH. We shut all the doors and windows and wet our blankets in the bottom of the shower. I am fifteen. Life, at last, suddenly feels important. My brother and I don’t talk about this, but I know we are both hoping that the fire will bring my father back. We are hoping that my father will see reports of the bushfire on television in Sydney, and that he’ll remember the time of the flood in London where the family camped together in an upstairs bedroom for a week. We are hoping the glamour of another natural disaster will bring him home.