Chapter 2

We came back to Oz when I was in year 5. I remember telling people that my old best friend was a little girl called Ashleigh, with lovely curly light-brown hair. I hadn't seen her since kindergarten. She was still attending the school and some kids found us and reunited us. I asked her what she was up to and she told me she had a boyfriend who was so handsome he made your knees wobble. It's funny but I went to high school with that boy and I remember him as a moody, gangly and awkward teenager.
That girl had a new best friend who was beautiful and I was quite jealous of her.
I've always wanted to be able to sing and one day I invited a girl to my house (it must have been about year 6) and I made her play a game where one of us would hide in the bathroom and sing a song and then it was the other person's turn. That was the whole game - I've pretty much spent the last 20 years positive that she thought I was crazy enough for her to have to go along with it.
My oldest sister had a bed in the basement made of two foam mattress stacked one on the other and I used to separate them and then do back flips onto them. That basement had a storage area under some stairs where all our old interesting "riches" had been stored while we were overseas. My father was furious when we opened that time capsule because his bronze bugle was dented which meant that someone had been in there while we were away. Blasted snooping renters. I still have the brass bugle. It's still dented and now it's brown and dull but I love it, and anyone who can play a trumpet can make it sing.
Canberra winters are very cold and the old water in the garden hose often freezes. It was during winter that my father took a bucket of boiling water down to the front lawn to thaw the hose. I don't know how he managed it, but somehow he stepped into that bucket and had a great deal of trouble taking his sneaker and sock off a grey, blanched and apparently painful foot.
That was a huge, beautiful 5 bedroom house in the very cheapest suburb of our town. It had a front lawn that was bordered by sleepers rising about a meter from the road. Kids used to ride down the hill onto our lawn, then launch off the lawn onto the road; several feet below. Once I was in the kitchen with my mother and we heard a horrible scream. She bolted out the front into the road an there was a boy in tears, holding both arms gingerly walking back up to our house. He hadn't reaslised there was such a big drop and had broken both his arms. My mother sat the boy down in her lap, held some ice to his forehead in a tea-towel and told his sister to get their mother. The sister pedaled off on a tiny pink bicycle and after some time the little pink bicycle returned with a drunk mother on it. My mum piled them both into her car and took them to the emergency department. That boy kept visiting my mum for a long time - it must have been close to a year.
While my father was away, we talked my mother into letting us get some pets. I was to get a rabbit and my middle sister was to get a cat. She was Furious when a little ginger cat "chose" me as its owner. I went into the cat cage with my sister. She picked the smallest, most pathetic little white cat - I doubt she was 8 weeks old. While I was in there a striped ginger cat came across to me and sat in my lap. She had no fear and was the only cat that approached me. I miss Tigger - she made it to about 18. My mother decided that Tigger was anti-social. I was the only person she liked and she was kind of protective of me.
My sister named her tiny white cat Tinkerbell. Tinkerbell eventually grew into a fat, greedy, narcissistic feline cow.

Chapter 1

I've thought for a long time that my memory was unusually fuzzy. I wanted to get some of my memories down in case I completely forget them. My lovely cousin recently told me that dementia can strike at any age and you can experience its effects twenty years before anyone realises something is wrong.

I guess I'd better start at the beginning then:

I was born under fairly common circumstances, in hospital, to a married couple with other children, in the early evening. I'm told I was late. I don't remember any of it.

Upon discovering that she was pregnant with me, my mother was initially told by doctors to have a termination. There was a large risk that I would carry the same hereditary disease that had killed my brother. Born into fairly unusual circumstances herself, she refused. Outright. My mother has always said that babies only come when and where they are needed. Her biological father was 76 and her biological mother was 30 when she was born. Her mother also had a tumour in her uterus the size of a football and she died from complications after childbirth. My mother's half-sister ended up adopting her.

My father worked in Defence and was posted to Jakarta when I was about 18 months old. My first sentence was in Indonesian. Our family had a cook and a nursemaid (as is the custom) so they must have been big influence on me.

After two years we returned to Australia spent a few years in Victoria and in the ACT and then were posted to Bangkok for four years. It was a fantastic experience - my sisters and I attended the International School there which seemed enormous at the time. We bought books of chits to trade for cafeteria lunches. The books cost 100 baht and I would buy them, tuck them into my sock and keep them safely at home only taking a few tickets out of it each day. I lost quite a few of those little books from my socks over the years. We had a traditional little playground with a swing and I used to swing as high as I could, then jump out of the swing when it reached its peak. It sounds dangerous, but the only time I got hurt doing that was when my pretty hilltribe dress got caught in the chain just as I jumped. The swing pulled me back with it and slammed me back down into the dirt. I didn't break anything, so it couldn't have hurt too much. There was a "Klong" at the very back of the oval and one time we watched a dead and bloated dog floating down it. I auditioned for the role of Oliver in the school musical and didn't even get into the chorus. My first boyfriend Charlie gave me some stickers (we were in year two). There were family holidays in beach cabins at Bangsaray where my father tried to shoo a wasp out of the house - while us girls were hysterically screaming and jumping around - it stung him through a tea towel. There were trips to orphanages where the babies were lined up wall to wall in metal cribs in huge rooms, always crying. My mother told me they were crying because they hardly ever got cuddled, even when they were having their bottle. We almost adopted one of those babies, a little girl called pooey. She had a lot of health problems; she had a club foot and a hole in her heart. Some American friends of my mother adopted a little girl who painted the wall above the bed in our spare room with poo when noone was watching her. We stayed at a holiday house in the country somewhere, could hear the thuds of tree snakes falling onto the roof and the deck. My oldest sister would walk with me to the school bus stop and once she nearly stepped off the gutter right onto a giant toad as big as a basketball. At least, I think it was that big... Toads from 25 years ago may appear larger than they were. When I was 6 my middle sister was 11 and my oldest sister was 16 so we didn't have a lot in common. I remember they fought a lot and from time to time I fought with my middle sister, but surprisingly not all that much. We happened to have the perfect neighbours; a family with two boys and two girls. The two girls were the same age as my middle sister and I, so we spent a lot of time at their house. Their parents were a lot more liberal than ours. They did all kinds of things that we would never be allowed to do, but they never seemed to get into trouble. Our parents thought those kids were a bit "wild". The apartments had cupboards with wooden lattice doors and one time my middle sister and her friend tied me and my friend up, trapped us in the cupboard and spat at us through the little gaps in the wood. Most of their spit got caught on the doors.

There was another family in the compound with two little boys around our age. One of them had a crush on me and he used to chase me around. One day I hit him hard in the face with a stilletto shoe; hard enough to draw blood. I felt awful for a long time but I don't remember apologising. He never told on me. Last I heard he was married; to a girl with my name! Odd how things turn out. There was another little boy in the compound who kept mostly to himself. My friend and I occasionally found dried bodies of little turtles and frogs on pathways behind the apartments and we blamed him. I have a vague notion that he had a violent father but I don't know if I've imagined that or I've just listened to some random gossip. I married him in the playground when I was about 8. One of our friends officiated and tied a rope around our wrists. He's a father now and I recently saw a photo of him shaking John Howard's hand.

So much of that time is vague and I don't know if that's normal or because I used to drink so heavily as a teenager. Kids can be pretty stupid.