Your Own Kind of Girl

old piano. It had a big crack down the middle and could never quite be tuned, but it was good enough to start lessons on, and so I did. Mrs Anderson taught me the names of the keys and how to read music. We played small songs about Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit and Walking Up The Scale. She was patient and encouraging, and I was always sorry, every week, when I had to tell her that I had not really practised. I didn’t mean to be bad, I just really didn’t like practising. What I liked doing was pretending to be Liberace. I had seen him on TV once in a white sequinned suit, sitting on his stool, taking a deep breath, and then just running his hands up and down the keys in a fury. And, so, I did exactly the same. Oh, the noise of it! As a general rule, my family were able to tolerate my racket. But, over time, I like to think their tolerance paid off. I went from making terrible, loud, up-and-down-the-keyboard sounds to quieter, sweeter, more pleasant sounds. At a certain point I realised that if I closed my eyes when I played, I saw pictures, and colours. Certain sounds would seem to sit in certain colour groups, and I suppose this was the beginning of my habit of sorting sounds into families in my head—making happy sounds, sad sounds, crazy sounds and then chunking them together, laying them out again and again into themes and then, later, songs. The thing I loved most about playing this way was that I didn’t have to think; all I had to do was follow the picture stream of the sound. Now the truth is, when I was a child, it was my sister Lisa who was the clearer talent. She was a bloody whiz on the guitar, and the piano, and the noises she made sounded like actual … songs. My noises didn’t sound like much, not from the outside—a mess, really—but I was teaching myself something; I was making a little world for myself, one where I had a place, right there at the centre.

Back in reality, I was a terrible music student. I was told again and again, by several teachers over the years, that although I had a ‘talented ear’, I would need to work much harder on my theory, and my practice. Unfortunately, my brain just could not see the point of it. All that pausing and reading, learning rules and following them, reading and pausing, felt so awkward, so clunky, so annoying. I could not sit still for the life of me. Why couldn’t I just play what I had heard the teacher play—listen and copy? I was good at that. Or why couldn’t I just play the new things in my head, the things my hands wanted to say? Why did I need rules when I could just hear a song, remember it with pictures, and then play it back? And why did I need to learn those boring songs? Why couldn’t I learn good songs? Of course, I said none of this aloud; I wouldn’t have known where to start, really. Teachers tried to teach me the names of chords, where notes should sit on the stave, the upper and lower clef, and I did try to do what they said but, for whatever reason, I always seemed to default back to what worked for me—approximation, mimicking, filling gaps by following the feeling of which notes sat well together, felt good together. I was obsessed with trying to make everything feel good, like it belonged. I played with sounds and songs the way other children played with dolls and dollhouses.

I moved very slowly through the Australian Music Examinations Board stages, all the way up to Grade Four. I’m not sure how, really. But I did win one award once, for a recital, when I was about eleven, the summer after I lost all that weight.

Ironically, the prize was a slim book on music theory called Rudiments of Music.

I still have it, and do plan to study it—one day.

One winter’s afternoon when I was fourteen or fifteen, I came home from school to discover my mother swanning around the kitchen wearing a smart beret.

‘What are you doing, Mum?’ I asked.

‘Setting the table,’ she said.

‘Mum, you’re wearing a beret. What’s going on?’

‘Oh, nothing—just having a few friends over after dinner, that’s all.’

At the age of forty-three, Mum went back to university to study psychology, sociology and, later, pastoral care. Even though she left school early, at age sixteen, to work in a bank in Amsterdam, she continued her education right throughout her life: first at night-school three times a week, studying business, business law and bookkeeping, and then, once she’d moved to Australia, she studied to became a nurse. Later in life, already a wife and mother, she went back and completed her high-school diploma and, now, here she was—a uni student.

Mum quickly made friends, younger friends, whom she would sometimes invite over for cheese and cask-wine and candlelight.

One of her friends was a songwriter called John Beavis. When I first met him, I remember thinking that I’d never met anyone like him in my life. He too wore a beret. He also brought his guitar. And after dinner, and red wine, after I heard him playing songs from the folk songbook, something familiar that I can’t explain clicked into place for me. You would never have known it by looking at me (blonde, puffy fringe, going through a ‘slightly sarcastic’ patch) but, that night, when I heard John play, a new space opened up in me. And when I heard him sing the songs of The Beatles, and Simon and Garfunkel, and then, after that, even some folk songs he’d written himself, I found that I was singing along. And it felt so good.

It twinkled that night, the thought that songs do mean something, the possibility