I remember being too short to reach the kitchen bench but feeling strong and fierce as I cracked the lid off a jam jar which, I now realise, Dad had most likely loosened for me, perhaps just to familiarise me with the feeling of victory. That was the kind of thing he would do.
I remember the feeling of beating James in an arm wrestle for the first time. I remember running up and down our street in bare feet, going from neighbour to neighbour, telling them jokes and asking them if they had seen my sisters or brother. I remember wild dancing with a light green-and-gold-threaded Indian scarf, chasing my small friend Aaron around his kitchen table, pretending to be Kate Bush from ‘Babushka’, and how it made him scream, for some reason. This was before I understood that not all children liked Kate Bush as much as I liked Kate Bush, and that maybe my impersonation was a bit too real for him.
I remember my kind-hearted mother giving a bowl of milk to the stray dog she called Sam, the black labrador slash kelpie mutt who just wouldn’t leave. I remember how he didn’t like balloons, or vacuum cleaners, because they were loud. And Mum said maybe someone had been mean to him in the past, but he would be happy here, living with us, and he was. It was cancer that got him in the end. He was seventeen.
I remember the city, Melbourne; the flower clock in the Royal Botanic Gardens, how sometimes it would just be dirt with metal hands rotating around it and then, the next day, it would be full of flowers again, like a miracle. I remember running my hands along the water wall at the National Gallery of Victoria, flicking coins into its fountains and making wishes. Wishing for a baby girl. I remember lighting candles in St Francis’ Church, the smell of the wax and the feeling of it dripping onto my wrist. I remember trying to hop up onto a stool at Pellegrini’s cafe on Bourke Street—one of the first places in the city to have a coffee machine, back in the sixties, which was why my parents did their early courting right there. I remember watching the owner, Sisto, red bandana around his neck, ladling my icy cold pink grapefruit granita from a steel vat into a tall glass. I remember the sweetness and the brain freeze as I sucked the drink up through my straw, and how my mother spoke so clearly whenever we were out, and that was the only time I ever noticed her Dutch accent: when she tried to speak clearly.
I remember standing on a stool at the sink next to my mother and singing songs and knowing the harmonies without trying and I remember how good that felt, to be able to do something well, to be able to delight her. I was a clever girl, she said. What would I have done without you?
I remember trying to make my mother laugh by pulling down my undies and kicking them off and then picking them up again with my toes and throwing them in the air and catching them. I remember how these silly little things cheered her up, and how I loved the sound of her laugh. How it settled my heart like nothing else.
I remember my father and his brothers singing Beatles songs like ‘Let It Be’ around a fire when we were camping, singing songs by The Seekers, Peter, Paul and Mary, Nana Mouskouri and Bob Dylan. A campfire, three chords and the truth: that’s all it took to make a singalong.
I remember learning that my father had a real job because someone put a bronze plaque on our front fence that James told me read Ian Bowditch. Solicitor. I remember his legal papers stacked all over the house; yellow and blue and pink. I remember the time when he was out, and I wanted to please him, so I decided to organise all his papers for him; put all the pink ones in one pile, and the yellow ones in another pile. I remember thinking how happy this would make him, but instead, when he camehome and saw what I had done, he made the loudest noise I’d ever heard him make, like a bear roaring, and I cried and hid under his desk. I remember my mum coming in, calming him down, and how eventually he crawled over to me under the desk to apologise for being so noisy. He said he didn’t mean it. I was a good girl. He liked me very much, he said. He patted me on the head, like a puppy. I learned later that those papers were from one of the most complex cases he had ever taken on. They had taken him weeks to sort and me only minutes to unsort. And then only seconds, really, for him to forgive me, and me to forgive him.
I remember knowing that my parents were good people, and that I wanted to be a good person too, but I used to worry that maybe I was bad.
I remember starting kindergarten, my mother walking me in and my first teacher, Mrs Bibby, greeting me at the door and showing me where to hang my yellow raincoat.
And I remember wanting to be small, like the other children, and I remember how I never felt small, only big. Too big, even when I was very little. Big boned, big mouthed—these were things I remember
