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.