Memoir is detection, invention, architecture, curatorship and veneration. It is the resurrection and culling of a million lived or imagined moments down to the few you can stomach and sell. In which section does it belong? Fiction? Or the other? The reconstruction of a dead world using the flotsam you find on the beach of your dotage-mind … a tusk, a mask and a seed from a fever tree have washed ashore – now recreate Africa.
The vermilion of your favourite pencil, the twisted secrets of a stuffed bear, the moods of a sister, the musk of your waking mother, the topography of your neighbourhood when held aloft in your father’s arms, the night sounds of your first house, the high place where a branch joined a trunk, despair’s first touch, love …
The past is limitlessly malleable. Facts die when tense changes. Memory has lain in a skull-sized crypt, mouldering, curing, mutating. There is no sure tool of archeology to work in such a space with such alchemic stuff. Truths will be different when they come out than when they went in. The lure of humour, the mirrored hall of ego, and the yen for invention, have distorted my boyhood world. If there is a moral responsibility to those who were there that I get this right … well, I haven’t. So to those people I say sorry. And I say write your own book and see how The Past fucks with you.
I guess I was hoping, during the writing of this boyhood, not to meet myself. To be able to keep that once-upon-a-me at arm’s length. Knowing and dreading I was likely to come face-to-face with a solipsistic little prick who used people for play. If I wrote honestly it would be ugly, I was sure of that. So I began to write a lie about a boy I never met. Then I realised, that’s just adulthood – that soft calibration of self. And I’ve been given a chance to tell the truth. To enter the confessional of posterity and sing like a canary.
So, I’m turning myself in. If you meet a little prick here, well, at least you’ve only had to meet him retrospectively, in the telling. I ask forgiveness from all those who had to meet the flesh-and-blood liar I was as a boy. He was combative, insidious, dishonest, and a vindictive vandal who needed violence visited upon him by someone who knew the line where a kicking turns from altruism to harm.
It will make you smile in wonder at the human gift for redemption that such a despicable boy could turn into such an honest writer and good and gracious man. You might then knit your brow, wonder if the boy was really a good boy, being painted bad by a wicked man for laughs. Don’t. That boy, the boy I was, was bad.
But Shepparton was a big enough town that as a kid you could never be known by all its adults. There would always be suckers who didn’t suspect I was a manipulative kid whose dreams were realer than their lives. I had blond hair and a smile that was a bigger fraud than organised religion. These gave me an edge.
In my defence – my fate was known from birth. Like a cancer-sufferer, or a Prince, whatever I did in my fledgling years was of little importance – Death or the Kingdom waited regardless. My childhood was always going to end with me being handed a sportscoat and a tie and riding off to a faraway castle for singular young people called Geelong Grammar. And all this – the minor boyhood, the infancy, the neighbours, the schooling, the friends and the town – would be replaced by another boyhood and better schooling and permanent friends and a city. This town and everyone in it, my world, was going to be substituted for a better one when the time came. That was the contract as sold to me in my cot.
So this first chapter of life was mine to do with as I pleased, I figured. I had free rein to treat the town the way other kids treated their ant farms. One day I’d drip honey on it, the next day I’d raise it up and shake it to see its inhabitants run cursing for shelter … then, of course, there was fire.
I couldn’t lose a friend who wasn’t going to be lost anyway when I went away. Like a person of Faith, I was born with a glowing afterlife. But mine would begin at thirteen in the cradle of the plutocracy, where all the habits of living my first baker’s dozen years in Shepparton would be slowly unlearnt and my sins forgotten and I would sit at the right hand of some genuine big shots. It made for a pretty free childhood, the knowledge that this life ended at thirteen.