I park the car and head for the house. Don’t expect her to make a fuss over you, I reason as I walk up the drive.

Remnants of a garden cluttered by Bunnings crap leads the way to the front door. Once inside the smell of animal hits followed by ear-splitting barks. Annoyed, I step over the pee mat on the kitchen floor and look for my mother. Who lets their cats and dogs pee in the kitchen? I am ashamed already and I haven’t even laid eyes on her.

She is in her chair, tea cup in hand with an oversized television on in the background. She does not get up. She says hello then her gaze returns to Eddie Mcguire.

I feel stupid for wanting her to welcome me. I need her to open her arms and smile in a way that creates laughter lines. It’s taken fifteen months, an interstate flight and a rental car to get me here. Instead I convince myself that it is reasonable for a mother to greet her child with no fanfare.

I ask her if she wants a cup of tea. Dutifully I walk into the kitchen and turn on the kettle. As usual the bench top is full of new plates and tacky shit from the two-dollar shop. Each time I come more clutter is forced into every nook and cranny. I don’t get it. In contrast to her, I loathe buying anything new.

I open the fridge. Next to the milk is my step father’s gin. It’s 5pm, an acceptable time to pour a drink. Besides, I’m in the tropics and a G&T is beckoning me. As I reach for ice cubes, I notice a piece of paper with my mother’s handwriting on it. I know what this means. She thinks she can freeze someone out of her life by placing them in the freezer. Bitch! It’s one of my sister’s names. The betrayal snaps any compassion out of me.

Just as I pour myself a drink my wife appears with our luggage. I can’t gauge if her eyes are judging me for drinking or giving me sympathy for being here. I just want to be wrapped up in her arms and melt away. Instead I make my mother her tea and feel obligated to unstack the dishwasher. The dishes aren’t mine but I am petrified of the accusation of being ungrateful for the free bed and feed.

I look at the clock. It’s late enough to chat for half an hour then find solace under the doona in the spare room. I sit in the unfamiliar lounge room and look at my mother. She is beautiful. Her hands have aged since I last saw her. Was she ever gentle or kind? I know a lullaby off by heart and once overheard my sister singing it to her kids. She must have been kind. We would only know it if she sang it to us.

Life is not a journey

A meandering path at best

Caught unaware at crossroads

The walker dare not rest

The path ahead obscured

Twists wildly to the right

A wall of foliage shades the way

Thorns hidden out of sight

Life is not a linear route

The past bears its’ own weight

The future an illusion

Which step decides my fate?

The stars shine on regardless

of choices that are made

Humanity is miniscule

Upon the universal stage

Yet every step imprints

A mark upon the ground

Filled with love and empathy

All life can be profound

Adversity can suck you down

So shine bright against the night

Stride ahead with joy and hope

Because life is worth the fight.

The first time I saw my mother as a separate person was in the late 1960s watching her peg washing on the line. My mother standing there, pegs in a bag laced around her waist over her apron, arms stretched up performing her daily ritual. Pegs on her line always matched the colour of the washed item in question: tea towel, dress, socks, blouse.  The two pegs the same colour, the colour matched to the tones and the hues of said washing. White pegs all along the white sheets.

Pegs identical. Always. My mother as archivist, librarian, scientist, artist. My mother in the middle of the back yard in suburban Sydney, thirty feet from the laundry window, thirty feet from her watching daughter. It was the 1960s when I disconnected her from myself, when I realised that she was making choices different from my own.

The next time was years later, when I held a pen in my hand, watching, waiting for her to leave the room where my father, her husband had just passed away. I was meant to be writing a list of things that needed to be done – song titles, photos to be found, food or rather refreshments, myriads of phone calls – all the practicalities which accompany recent death. For me death was an unknown entity. I was writing memories.

Eventually she stood and her face was as resolute as faces can be. My mother’s life was now her own, separate from all that had been before. We walked to the hospital lift together without a glance back.  I hesitated but only in my mind. My feet dragged but as they say only metaphorically. I wanted to stay and not leave him there alone, but she never hesitated and we walked out, out into the light of the afternoon and got into our car and drove away.

Is that your story, your experience of death?

It is mine and one now with emotions so deeply interned that I have never gone to my father’s grave. Twenty-five years later this is still so overwhelming that my voice can’t utter any of this above a whisper. I am lost and unable to go to the place that I want to though now wonder if I need to.

Should I ask a friend?  No one has heard my desire, no one has seen me this way. In sixty years I have never broken down in front of any one. Who could I take to my father’s grave?

My lover? My granddaughter? My mother? Each one attracts complicated emotions.

Do you have a blue one asked my mother at the funeral home.  A blue coffin, don’t ask me why, a blue draped cloth surely would do. What did she know, what did she want to match this time?

This was not a wedding I thought, something old something blue – time was collapsing and the bad joke in my thoughts was not lost – weddings, funerals, christenings, blue for boys, for fathers wounded in wars, for fathers suffering the blues.

Blue haze certainly swirled in the days that marched on in those years after my father died. I probably needed to be told, you have permission to cry, you have permission to die a little inside.

It’s called disco dingo my mother said at the funeral home, he would like it played when we leave the service. I was no longer listening, I was merely surviving and hovering above it all.

Can you smell that? I said when we left the crematorium, the eucalypt in the air? I think he would like that. Even since I have looked out for a delicate scented candle to bring it all back but eucalyptus oil could never be deemed ephemeral, it’s far too potent for the business of grief.

A few days after my father died, a kookaburra flew down and sat under the clothes line, the line that still stands thirty feet from the laundry window in suburban Sydney, and I knew that my father was back.

Kookaburras now follow me wherever I go, turning up in any place where I need to know that I am safe, at retreats far from home, at times when I just needed a companion and once at a cancer healing centre in the hills outside Melbourne. I have learned not to be surprised.

I don’t pin up washing using clothes pegs of the same colour, chosen to perfectly match the colour of each separate tea towel, dress, sock or blouse. I am less patient than my mother for that task. I do however never put two pegs of different colours on any piece of washing. Whenever I rush and tell myself this is ridiculous, I always sigh and reach into the peg bag laced around my waist and change them to make it so.

I first met Thor at high school in year 8. I had moved into 8.1 on account of my mother who was a teacher at the school and thought that the group of misfits that formed 7.6, an whom I had gleefully befriended, were not going to be a lasting or successful influence for me. Thor stood out as ‘not from these parts’. He had a uniform that roughly approximated the one we all wore down to every article, but matched none, and it was clearly assembled from various hand me downs and op shop excursions. He also had a thick Southern American accent. In a town like Stawell, and he travelled to Stawell from a far smaller and remote town of Rupanyup, the American accent alone was a death sentence. The poverty was common to most of us but when combined with the accent there really was no escape.

I look back now quite proudly that I took to Thor with open eyes but in reality it probably wasn’t due to an advanced lack of prejudice but more a sense that he was a non threatening version of myself, slightly poorer, slightly more alienated, slightly less funny. Perhaps that’s a cruel thing to say. He is after all my best friend and a profound influence in so many ways. It’s hard to put your forty something brain back into the mind and body of a 13 year old. This feels like the end of that thread but it’s not really, in the 10 minute trial my lack of continuity is starting to show. The fear that without a structure I might lose my way and write shit? Perhaps that in itself is shit? I know how to get work done, I know that shit work leads to good work, you cant build the perfect temple in your mind, and we have just watched a video drilling down the same message. This really is an exercise in finding or testing what could happen in ten minutes…back to Thor.

I think of all of my childhood as perhaps the most perfect time. It could be described as a trial if you wished to do so but the truth is that it was perfect, and it launched me to early thirties, to job, to family. Its probably the family that causes you to question. The job can longer be the achievement by which you measure and tick off success. Somehow propelling the kids is not enough. It should be but how do you achieve a balance?

Back to the childhood. It was always defined by a side kick, a best mate, and they always changed. In order: Doug, Daniel, Ty (he runs through all as a background sub best mate), the 7.6 misfits, Thor, Brian, Scott, Ben, Brett, Thor, Stuart, Thor. It does always come back to Thor. I haven’t seen him now for two years. He has his own family and it seems awkward to force these two clans together so we can chew the fat. The reality is that there is currently no sidekick. Perhaps its Olly, but you can’t do that to your son, he needs a dad, not another mate. It’s not mutually exclusive but there is a difference. It’s all pretty reflective. Could you sit through a whole novel of me self reflecting? There would need to be some actual action, some character interaction and I’m not sure I could write that well. The issue is that the books I like best are fiction. Jasper Jones has lots of self reflection. Shipping News has none. It’s the events that tease out the thinking. The Beach? I’d need to read it again, try to work out why I loved it. The ten minutes is really starting to drag now. I am deeply suspicious that she has stopped the clock. Perhaps I should try some third person?

Ray sat in the writing class wondering exactly what he might get out of it. Being the only male was not particularly surprising in hindsight (perhaps a little in real time) but the mix of personalities was a pleasant surprise. Some of these people have been writing for years and there seem some genuinely recognisable stars. Its safe to say that Ray is the only one in the room who knows nothing about the host. Her enthusiastic and frequent embrace of the word cunt reminds him of an old house mate, Lucy, and more specifically her mother, both of whom were regular c bomb offenders. That house in Brunswick was a seminal chapter in Rays evolution. House mates he neither knew nor, for extended periods, liked, but grew to love.

Back to the third person.

The pen has created a red furrow in his index finger, plain evidence of a lack of recent pen form.

‘Does anybodies finger hurt?’

It got a laugh but the room was pretty focused. There was a collective determination, a bit like a marathon pack, right beside each other but at the same time completely in your own head.

Ray looked outside the window, a glance really, pausing now would feel like failure. Dev had given strict instruction that the pen could not stop. The leaves outside where practically glowing read and Rays mind drifted to what might otherwise be on this resplendent autumn afternoon. What would the kids be doing? No doubt Baba had arranged some kind of activities but the tone at drop off suggested there would be a fair bit of screen time too.

Some dialogue.

Ray arrived 15 minutes early. It had felt like a tight drop when he bustled the kids out the door and drop off at Babas had been nothing short of abrupt. Dump and run. The Saturday traffic had been kind though and he now found himself with ten minutes to wait. The venue was clearly closed with no prospect of opening ahead of time. Whoever was in there was pottering about in the same non attentive and dismissive manner as the kinder carers before the 8:30 door open. Whatever they were doing, it was going to take until exactly 10:00am, their walk to the door timed to hit the handle as the second hand struck twelve. There were two people outside…the clock stops. Its pens down.

Pinjarr is 1000kms from a shop, on a no through road. The NRMA book said must travel in 3 car convoy. No one had ever headed North of Pinjarr. Planes fly in once a week for fuel.

The town has 30 residents, all Ngapatjarra. And then there’s Dave, the middle aged white community manager. He runs the shop, airport and council as well as doing the fortnightly water run. And there’s Helen, a white school teacher who just so happens to be having an affair with Dave. There are three cars in Pinjarr. Dave’s, Helen‘s and Harold Tjanittarra’s – an elderly artist of distinction. We arrived in a 4WD Toyota Land Cruiser that belonged to the Art Centre. It lasted 2 weeks and we were here for 12, in February, when it’s 40 degrees. You can’t drink the water in Pinjarr. If you do….

What took you so long? He’s irritated and suspicious, holding something in his hand, flicking it against the palm of the other. I squint in the din to see it is a newspaper clipping. Subliminally, he’s accusing me of something, but I know he won’t say what it is, so I don’t ask.

I stammer. Um, I was, well I was trying to get to the money exchange before it closed. He moves across the room to study my face for lies. I can see the black and white picture in his hand, creased and senseless and out of place in this situation. I wanted to…

Thought you could do it without me did ya? There it is; accusation number one.

No no no I say, shaking my head, comforting his worries, assuring his control. I know I don’t need him. I wanted to exchange this money for you. I smile, sweet and innocent, tugging the scrunched up note from my pocket.

I had hoped they would offer me maybe ten dollars for this note. I thought it would be worth something. As it turned out, I couldn’t exchange it at all. The place was closed. But the signs in the door suggested that the money wouldn’t be worth very much at all.

I’m keen to change the subject. What’s that? I point to the picture, and he glares at me, his eyes wide and disbelieving.

This is us, he says, emphasising the last word and handing the clipping to me. His eyes are dark and there are baggy circles around them and his entire face cracks into a fucked up laugh. I examine the static image, the white criss-crossed lines where the paper had been folded again and again. A skeleton sitting awkwardly on an art deco lounge, beside it a naked body curled up all flesh and pillowy limbs.

I shake my head in dismissal. His humour is hard to understand. I don’t get the joke.

Where the fuck did you get money from anyway? The focus is me again. He hasn’t forgotten his suspicions. He is close to snapping. He is feeling the itch. He snatches the note from my hand, turning it over and over to inspect it. His face scrunches up; confusion, annoyance. The face of Singapore’s monetary chairman is looking up at him, wistful and proud. I know this, because I too have studied that two dollar note intensely.

In the early days, I would have been worried about how he would react to me. I would have been shocked at his jagged outbursts. But today I am bored with him. It would be odd to see him react in any other way.

This isn’t fucking money he says as he tries to throw the money angrily back at me. Gravity catches it almost immediately, and it flutters delicately onto the carpet. I hide my smile at the futility, at his anger for me which is as impotent as he is.

What is your surname, girl. He says it, he doesn’t ask it.

Blake I say, giving him his own last name and forcing my gaze to my toes. There is dirt under the nails, and the knuckles have turned brown. I think about washing my feet after he goes to sleep, even though I know I won’t. It’s a good distraction in the meantime.

_

He has fallen asleep on the couch after stabbing at the tv remote and growling under his breath. He is always oblivious to me after a good mocking or an uncomfortable fucking. The stupid clipping is still on the couch next to him. I want to take it and burn it, but more than that I don’t want to wake him up. That’s why it takes me a minute or two to latch the door when I leave.

The night outside is cold. I never considered that when I left but I can’t go back. Too risky.

Fingering the Singaporean money in my pocket, I wonder if it will be any good to use at the Asian deli on the corner, though I doubt it.

His picture clung to my mind like sticky marinade. Who was the strangely disfigure skeleton? Who was the fleshy entranced body? Things went downhill quick with us. Sunshine, moonlight, good times, boogies…that was the guy I used to know.

And now he is lost in a void of incorrect adaption and mistaken identity. And I am trapped in a void of my own.

_

It takes me nearly an hour to follow the bike path in the dark to Petty’s house. When I knock on the door it nearly falls off its hinges and the window beside it has been smashed out so many times he doesn’t bother replacing it anymore. What a sad line of work he is stuck with. I think about how I am stuck with it too.

Petty has one of his girlfriends open the door. She is tall and skinny and blonde. Her eyes are doughy. Her mouth is flat-lining. There are no cheeks lining her cheekbones. She doesn’t look at me but leaves the door open so I can let myself in.

The room is hazy with about five girls sitting on lounges smoking a joint of impressive size. Petty’s in the kitchen one of them mutters, not looking away from the movie blaring at them five feet away.

I navigate through the hallway down to the kitchen, and find Petty with his bong and his xbox. I wish my life could be that simple.

We exchange pleasantries and I cut to the chase. I need tick. Petty laughs, shaking his head.

I’m disappointed in you Girl, he says. Petty was two years below me at school, but he still calls me girl. It’s his birthright apparently. I wave the two dollars from Singapore under his nose.

This is all I have! I don’t even think it’s worth anything.

I can tell Petty feels sorry for me, underneath his mask of stubble and testosterone. So I say It’s for him Petty. He’s losing the plot.

And twenty minutes later, I am back on the bike track. My heart is beating. I’m in a rush. I know there is an old abandoned corolla at the back of the carpark. It’s been there months. I’m surprised no one has torched it yet. I pull at the rusty chrome handle and shove open the door. The inside is dry and quiet and dark. I know no one can see me in here.

I search under the seat, palpitations in my throat until my fingertips graze the black plastic box I stashed there last week. I pull the ring top and retrieve the last tool in the kit.

I have a little tin can for the garbage, I drained the soup from it but left the lid mostly attached. This is where I stuff the paper rubbish that I peel methodically from the fit. I pop the orange cap off the end and place it carefully on the dash for reuse.

I wrap my left hand around my right arm, just above the veins and squeeze. They burst purple and blue. I feel as though I cannot breathe, so I take a moment to steady myself. I hate shaking this much.

When the tip of the needle enters the skin, the vein, I pull back a little and see the red mini mushroom cloud explode back into the syringe. Gently push. The warmth fills my throat, my neck and my spine. I lean back into the old polyester seat and close my eyes. I promise this will be my last taste.

We had walked and walked and walked and the hope of finding a comfortable and aesthetically pleasing campsite was proving more difficult than I thought. The terrain was thick, the sun was fierce and the undulation of the country was manipulative and misleading. The clients were tired, I was geographically impaired, the sun was falling heavily into hiding and all my instincts screamed to just set up camp at the next waterway, if only I could find one.

Bec whispered that the clients were tiring and we needed to stop, soon, as the country fell away and the sun bid farewell we eventually stumbled across a creek system that was soiled by cattle, foul smelling and trickling a brilliant, bright orange.

‘Camp’ I yelled ‘any complaints put them in writing and I’ll use them to start the fire’

Blowing carelessly and easily through the dry yet invigorating air. Old and rusty gate still hanging strong as if it were always there. Fish skeletons hang limply with brown crust leeching on, and an old cow’s head. As the car rolled in I noticed the proud, peeling old gum trees haphazardly lining the route. Toads lazily hopped out of harm’s way. I see a concrete veranda, an old unused bar and an outdoor setting that’s definitely seen some stuff. What stuff? I’m not sure but I’m ready. It’s polar opposite to home but somehow I feel familiar here and I feel ready.

“Yeah, g’day, how’re-yas?’ A twangy, quietly confident and knowing voice cut the air. That air. There was definitely something in the air. It’s new and it’s different but I know it’s for me. I jump out of the Pajero and land a little stiffly considering I’d only been sitting in the car for an hour. The journey felt like eternity though. It was because I couldn’t wait. I wasn’t sure what I couldn’t wait for; I knew when my feet hit the ground and the dust settled on my feet. It wouldn’t be long before my soles would be eternally brown and red from the earth and my heels calloused. Goodbye Doc Martens and Acne boots.

A fresh faced blonde trailed behind the man and said hello in a similar twang; strange considering I knew she was from Melbourne and had only been here for 3 or 4 weeks. She looks friendly enough. Holly and I grab our bags and dump them on the veranda. Straight onto chicken shit. The first of what was a lot of shit to come. “You’s are out back in the donga.” The man extended his hand and with a classic, cheeky, Aussie grin introduced himself as Ray. He was wearing a dark blue shirt with the sleeves cut off at the shoulder seam, some holey shorts, bare feet and a battered Akubra with a feather. This, as I was soon to learn, was his outfit. It was like the birth-child of Russel Coight and Inspector Gadget. Two people I love.

I throw my bags in this ‘donga’, which is the Territory version of a bungalow. As I’m running back to the house I survey my new home for the next 5 weeks. It was red, dry, barren and flat. I noticed the uninterrupted horizons and was full of excitement; I needed a shake up from my ordinary life back home. Entering the house I’m suddenly being shoved back out. “I just need to grab,” I start, “No you don’t”, Holly interrupted as she harshly pulled me away from the house. I’m sharing a room with this girl, we’ve only just met and she’s already manhandling me. Then she tells me. She relays the scene she just witnessed and I wasn’t sure. This was some real Home & Away shit. She must have heard wrong. “No”, she assures me. She truly had just witnessed and an argument between Ray, the blonde girl and Ray’s long term partner, Sarah. “Are you sure, sure?” I continue doubting her. “Ab-so-lut-ely,” she drew out the word. Ray had leaned in and kissed the blonde girl, just as Sarah walked in.

Sarah would soon become an important mentor in my life and one of the strongest women I have met, and over the next year I was about to witness one of the most difficult experiences of her life.

Shereen was the blonde girl who changed everything. Shereen was about twenty years Ray and Sarah’s junior. Shereen was an escaper. “They’re three types of people who come to the Territory,” Sarah told me. The escaper, the evangelist and the adventurer.

I wasn’t sure who I was. At the time I think I’m an adventurer, but perhaps I’m also an escaper. Can I be both? The Territory is a place to easily become lost in. It’s a strange place; you get lost, you become more grounded, you find yourself, then you get lost again. Maybe that is because I left and returned, left and returned. I know this is horrible and cheesy, but yes, like a boomerang. Perhaps I confused myself- mixing the city life and suburbia with the remote. Both harsh in a different way.

Holly and I, within the first ten minutes of our arrival had become a part of what was soon to be a web of deceit, fun, mystery and reality. Holly left after five weeks, as did I. But, back again I went, straight back into it. I watched as people’s lives were both shattered and made. It was weird, it was uncomfortable and it felt fake. I was a 24 year old watching the most intimate aspects of people’s lives and awkwardly stuck in between. Involved. But not involved. This is my story. And also Ray’s story, Sarah’s story and Shereen’s story. A small outback town’s story-because, no secret stones are left unturned. There were only two truths in this town, the sun will rise in the morning, and your neighbour, and neighbour’s neighbour will know your business, often before you do.

“WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG?” said the lanky boy with the aviator glasses. He was standing in the foyer of the hotel and his accusatory tone implied that I had met him before and that we had agreed on a pre-determined time to meet. “I think that you have made a mistake”, I politely replied,”I have never met you before.” The young boy smiled revealing a perfect set of white teeth followed by a glimpse of his velvety dark eyes as he lowered his glasses from his face.

THE FIRST TIME HE SPOKE TO ME I was amazed at his confidence and self assurance. “Of course you have never met before, I was sent by Mr Lee”. I stared at his youthful countenance, summoned my voice of authority and reported that I had never heard of a Mr Lee. “Then why do you have a ten dollar note in your pocket with Mr Lees name on it? “I searched my pocket and to my surprise found a note with Mr Lees name and number written on it in black pen.

“WHAT IS YOUR SURNAME YOUNG MAN?’ I commanded with a note of frustration and mounting disbelief in my voice. I was determined to get to the bottom of this misunderstanding. “Just follow me” the mysterious youth sighed, and started to swagger off to a side street.

IT WAS NIGHTTIME when he finally stopped playing the pied piper and halted in front of a red door. I couldn’t believe that I had followed him for two hours. My feet ached and I was completely lost, but I had clung to the sight of him as he raced ever faster in front of me.

The sign above the red door said SUNSHINE MOONLIGHT GOOD TIMES BOOGIE ! “What kind of a place is this?” I questioned. “Just come inside” he beckoned with urgency. On entering the darkened hallway, I could hear the unrestrained cheers of a party in full swing: glasses clinking, music throbbing and thunderous applause. The young man turned to me and said “Now it’s your turn to entertain the crowd.”

“I’M SORRY CAN YOU REPEAT THAT?” “You’re on stage next, be ready in five”. Five minutes?” I yelled over the noise of the crowd. “No, five seconds. 4,3,2,1.. you’re on.” Suddenly a spotlight lit up my bewildered face which was now turning the colour of a beetroot and the noise of the crowd grew silent in expectation. I was introduced as Australia’s next rising comedic star and as the applause tapered off I grabbed the microphone and stared out into the audience. Should I just wing it, I thought. I had always wondered if I had the nerve and bravado to be a stand up comedian. Just do it came a reply from within. And with that, I began my first night on the stage as a comedian.