I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes

The Blue Plastic Chair Leg

2011-05-26T16:07:00.005+10:00

What if you decided to set up a little stall on a street corner. And you found strange things around your house, many of them broken— or actually, you made strange things out of the broken items around your house. Craft out of egg cartons and glued-on glitter, maybe. And let’s say you placed all these objects in your stall.

And then people came by and said, ‘oh, that’s nice,’ about your strange broken pieces, and you were silent. Now and then you said, ‘Thank you,’ or, ‘Thank you so much. You are kind.’ Then, a while later you brought out another strange little piece and put that in the stall, and the people wandered back and looked, and didn’t say much. Or maybe they said, ‘This is nice. I made something like this once,’ and a long time later you came back and said, ‘Did you? How about that.’ And so on.

But then, let’s say you went home and just left the stall there. Months and months went by. Years even. And now and then the people would come back and they might call out, ‘Hello?’ or they might say nothing. They might say to themselves, ‘Well, I’ve seen all these before.’ And the strange things at the stall would be getting rusty. Rain-damaged. Spiders spinning webs and laying eggs in the shadows.

Until people stopped coming by at all. The corner would be empty. The whole street empty. The stall leaning sideways, uncertain, dusty. Tumbleweed, I guess – if this is some old country ghost town that we’re talking about — tumbleweed blowing down the street. Or old plastic bags floating by on the grey breeze, wrapping themselves around telegraph poles, then floating on — if it’s more of a contemporary setting.

Well, how could you ever come back?! How could you return to your strange little stall and bring new strange pieces, and expect any people to come and look again!

You couldn’t. Not really. And certainly not until you’d finished your next book.

The only reason I’m here now is because a friend pointed out that my latest post on this blog refers to upcoming events in August and September of last year. And, he said, if you don’t update your blog, people will read that and think you’re referring to this year.

It was a good point.

So here is a thin blanket. I’m just quickly cross-stitching a thin blanket, which I am going to place over the stall, to hide the old and rusting objects.

*

What’s been going on. Well, I’m nearly finished the first book of The Kingdom of Cello. It will be a trilogy: the first book is set partly in Cambridge, England, and partly in the Kingdom of Cello. There’s a girl called Madeleine and a boy called Elliot.

Also, not long ago, on a cold, bright night, I went to the Sydney Opera House for the Premier’s Literary Awards. Dreaming of Amelia (or The Ghosts of Ashbury High) was shortlisted for the Ethel Turner Award. I was honoured to be on a list with these wonderful writers: Michelle Cooper, Cath Crowley, Kirsty Eagar, Belinda Jeffrey and Melina Marchetta. And I was so glad to be on the same table as the lovely winner, Cath Crowley, whose Graffiti Moon is beautiful, dreamy and hilarious.

*

I was never good at cross-stitch. In fourth grade, we had to do a cross-stitch pattern on a piece of white cloth, and Mrs Mackenzie chose mine to show the class how bad cross-stitch could be.

Nobody knew it was mine.

‘I don’t know whose this is,’ Mrs Mackenzie said, ‘because whoever did it was too ashamed even to write their name on it.’

A gasp ran right across the classroom.

Actually, I’d done it maybe seven or eight times. Each time I tried it looked terrible! So I’d pull out all the stitching and try again. I did this over and over, and each time it got worse, and meanwhile the white square kept getting greyer and more smudged. Crumpled and food-stained like an old tea towel.

I tried one more desperate time – undoing it all, and starting again — this was at Little Lunch, and I got some of my raspberry iceblock on it. The bell rang and the cross-stitching was half finished and worse than ever. But it was too late. We had to hand them in. Forgot all about putting my name on it.

*

What else has been going on? Well, I saw the movie Mrs Carey’s Concert, and it’s a documentary. I was so interested, and so moved. All the chaos, and the chasms between what teachers say and what students understand them to be saying, and then all the beautiful music. It’s about the Sydney girls’ school, MLC, and how they have a concert at the Opera House every two years, and the whole school participates. That school, it seem to have an extraordinary number of talented musicians with smiles that light up rooms. Also, a gathering of bad, wild, giggling, beautiful, defiant girls.

*

That cross-stitching episode. The one where the teacher held up my work. Well, the whole class was hushed and shocked. And so was I, but only mildly. Mostly I felt interested. A detached curiosity. The distance between the truth and what teachers believe! How wrong teachers can be!

Even when they’re speaking in their low, slow, impressive voice with flashing, angry eyes.

I mean, she was right that it was terrible work. But the whole thing about me being too ashamed to put my name on it. Seriously, why would I have deliberately left off my name? What would be the point of handing something in without a name?

*

I just realised that MLC —the Sydney girls’ school that featured in that documentary movie— well, I spoke at that school last year! It was good, I remember that. But do you know what, it’s one of the 'upcoming events' that I refer to in my latest blog post! So, that’s interesting.

*

Not long ago, I was asked to bring a blue plastic chair leg inside the house. It had been lying in the garden, this small chair leg — and I was asked to bring it inside and wash it at the kitchen sink so it could be used as a telescope.

Anyway, while I was washing it a dark shadow flew out of the end of the chair leg.

‘What was that?’ I said, thinking, just a leaf. But my friend cried, ‘It’s on your back!’ and then the next instant, ‘Where’s it gone?!’

That’s a bad time. That’s a terrifying time in anybody’s life. When your friend explains that a giant huntsman spider was just sitting on your back, but now she can’t figure out where it’s gone.

*

The other day, my mother called to say there would be wild winds in the night. At 4 am, she said, wild winds. People are supposed to make sure that there’s nothing lying around in their yards, she explained, ready to fly away.

I thought of my back yard and all the junk and toys. I imagined the wading pool flying through the air and shattering a neighbour’s window. This was about eleven o’clock at night, and cold, and to be honest I didn’t want to go into my backyard.

But I put my jacket on over my pyjamas, and went out there, and started bringing in the broken toys and junk and pieces of cheap outdoor furniture.

I stamped on the cardboard box which Charlie and I had been filling with dirt the other day. He wanted to make snowglobes out of dirt, he said. The first step, he decided, was to fill up this cardboard box with dirt from the garden. He named us ‘clerks’, and what clerks do is, they make snowglobes out of dirt. His job was to pat the dirt down in the box, and mine was to dig it out of the garden. He was pretty bossy. The whole time I was worrying about the next step — about what would happen when the cardboard box was full — because I knew it would be my job to turn that box of dirt into the snowglobes. I just knew it. Luckily, we got distracted by lunctime, and after lunch we had new job titles and descriptions, and essentially what we had to do, was to empty all the dirt into the wading pool.

Anyhow, so I stamped on the box and put it in the recycling bin, and carried all the broken toys and pieces of plastic furniture and the dirt-filled wading pool— I carried them all into the house from the dark and gusty yard, and all the time I was thinking about flying shadows. That night, the wild winds never came.

*

The giant hunstman spider turned up later that night on the kitchen wall. I got it with the fly swatter. I thought: I have just one chance here. And I hit it hard and fast, and I got it. Then I felt sad and ashamed. Thinking about how happy he’d probably been, that spider, living in his plastic tube home, not harming a fly. Well, maybe a fly now and again. But still! Next thing it had found itself in the chaos of a human kitchen sink! Poor little guy. Big guy, I mean.

*

What else. Well, I just made a tuna pasta bake for Charlie’s dinner. Just now. Downstairs. It’s in the fridge, ready to put in the oven later. At one point I thought the recipe said to add eleven and a half cups of cheddar cheese. I was, like, what?! But I looked again and it was just one and a half cups. That makes more sense, I thought. So then I chopped up some butternut pumpkin and some eggplant, and I’m going to roast that in the oven, and that’ll be my dinner. After that I had this weird urge to make an apple crumble. I haven’t made one in years. But there were all these apples in the fridge, and I suddenly really wanted to make an apple crumble. I looked up a recipe and it was talking about putting ginger in the crumble and I was, like, ginger is totally good for you! My mum was just saying the other day! As for apples, well, don’t get me started about those. That whole scaring away the doctor thing? Anyhow, but in the end I decided I’d better not make an apple crumble. I’d better come back upstairs to work.

*

That paragraph I just wrote. The one about the tuna pasta bake and, etc. I’m thinking, if anybody comes along to my stall on the corner, and they see that paragraph, well, they’ll pick it up and turn it over and put it back down. Then they’ll go, “Oka-a-a-ay,” in that way people do, and then they’ll move on.

Speaking

2010-08-16T21:05:00.003+10:00

On September 10, there will be a one-day ‘Teen Writers’ Masterclass’, for 12 to 17-year-olds, at the National Maritime Museum, Darling Harbour. It will be run by Anthony Eaton, Susanne Gervay, publisher Linsey Knight, and me. The details are here.
Also, I am speaking at the Abbotsleigh Literary Festival tomorrow, at MLC next week, and at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival on 31 August.
Thank you.

Sponge Cake

2010-08-16T20:54:00.003+10:00

My friend came to visit and she said, I’ll make a sponge cake, and she did. Her children played with Charlie, a game with the giant plastic candy cane from last Christmas. They were sliding it down the bannister. Also, they all painted pictures, and we pegged the paintings to the security door at the back of the house to dry in the wind.

They left behind a quarter of the sponge cake, and all of the children’s paintings, and one of these paintings — a rainbow of colours by my friend’s three-year-old - was so good, the colours blending so beautifully, subtle yet bright, gently symmetrical — that I wondered if I should save it, and use it as a thankyou card the next time a distant relative sent Charlie a present.

On the phone, later that day, I told my mother about the sponge cake — how perfect it was, how glad I was that there was still some left to eat - and my mother was filled with excitement. ‘In my whole life,’ she said, ‘I’ve only ever known two people who could make sponge cake! And one of them is dead!’

Later still, I looked at the little boy's rainbow painting, and a memory came to me — how I once said to a friend, ‘Should I get coloured contact lenses? I’d like to have green eyes,’ and my friend said, ‘If you did that,’ he said, ‘if you got coloured contact lenses - that would be the greatest lie you ever told.’

I threw the rainbow painting away and I got Charlie to do his own splashed, blotched, leaking swirl of clashing colours, to send as a thankyou card to his Great Great Auntie Ivy for the remote control monster truck.

Dwarf Magnolia

2010-08-16T19:58:00.004+10:00

We were walking down the hill and there was a notice pinned to a tree that said, ‘This weeping bottlebrush has been scheduled for removal’. The reason for removal was its ‘advanced state of decline.’ The council planned to replace it with a ‘dwarf magnolia’. The tree hung so low, and was so grey, and no wonder it was weeping.

It might have been the same day

2010-08-16T19:55:00.003+10:00

It might have been the same day, walking down the hill, and I’d just collected Charlie from pre-school. He said, ‘I lost my voice at pre-school today,’ and I said, ‘Did you?’ and he said, ‘Yes, but then I found it in the sandpit.’

'The wind blew the cover of the sandpit aside,' he said. 'And there was my voice.’

Fanfarlo

2010-08-16T19:47:00.005+10:00

I went to see Fanfarlo at a place called the Gaelic Club, and we were waiting near the back, and someone with a big camera said, ‘Can I photograph you for the -?’ and we couldn’t hear what he said, but we said, okay, fine, and smiled. Then we saw him approach another person, who shook his head, no, no, and another, who also shook his head, no, and another after that.

In the girls’ bathroom there was a boy at the sink applying mascara, and a blonde girl beside him was helping him, and they both turned to me and laughed, and then there they were on the stage, in the support band. Its name was Guineafowl. I felt a strange connection to them, since I’d just seen them applying mascara. I felt proud of them too, they were good! Then another support band called Wim, and they were good too! Then we were waiting near the back of the room, and down the stairs behind us came running footsteps, and then right in front of us, a row of small people, with smiles and bright eyes, and my friend said, ‘I think that’s the band,’ and we moved closer to the stage. So I felt a connection with them too, having seen them running right by with their bright eyes. They were wonderful! I loved them!

And I always listen to their CD when I’m driving out to Castle Hill, so each song at the Gaelic Club took me straight back to that journey — this one I’m overtaking a truck on the M2, this one I’m just switching my headlights on as I head into the Lane Cove Tunnel, this one I’m merging onto the transit lane and Charlie is saying, along with the music, 'the sky is too quiet, the sky is too quiet', with his own quiet pride, and I am saying, after a moment, 'I think it says the sky is so shallow.'

So, now, when I’m driving out to Castle Hill and listening to my Fanfarlo CD, it takes me straight to the Gaelic Club, and there I am close to the stage, and then in turn I am taken directly back to the M2, to the Lane Cove Tunnel, to the transit lane, to the too-quiet sky.

Canyon

2010-08-16T19:42:00.003+10:00

We were walking through a canyon - through a street with houses set high on either side of us. Charlie shouted, once or twice, for the echo. He likes echoes, shadows, reflections on water, people who have his name. He shouted, ‘hello!’, once or twice, then he gave up and began speaking to me in his ordinary voice. Only now he was adding a soft, fading repetition to the end of each sentence. ‘I’m getting tired – tired – tired. Can you carry me – carry me – carry me.’
I laughed. I said, ‘Ha, you’re doing your own echoes.’
He said, ‘It’s not funny – funny – funny. Why can’t you carry me – carry me – carry me?’
I said, ‘Well, I’m carrying all the groceries, I can’t carry you as well.’ He walked along moodily for a while. ‘You could put the bags down – down – down,’ he said, ‘ and carry me – me – me.’
‘You’re three years old,’ I said, ‘you don’t need to be carried.’
‘Yes I do - do - do. My legs aren’t working – working - working’.
‘You do that echo well,' I said, laughing again.
‘Why are you laughing – laughing – laughing?’ His voice was angry except for the echoes, which faded gracefully, indifferent. ‘I’m not being funny – funny – funny.’ He looked up at me, troubled. ‘It’s just that we’re in echoland – echoland – echoland.’ And he kept it up, never once smiling, until we got around the corner and out of echoland.

31. Blue Balloon

2010-05-31T17:47:00.004+10:00

Last day of May today, a wild and rain-drenched day, and we were at the doctor’s again. She said, ‘You’re becoming my most loyal patients,’ and she said, ‘You don’t do rain by halves in this country, do you?’ and she joked, ‘See you again next week!’ She looked in Charlie’s ears and said, ‘Best I’ve ever seen them.’ Charlie and I both smiled.

On the way home, there was a sunbreak in the rain and when we turned a corner, a bright rainbow, and I thought, well, that’s almost too much – maybe I shouldn’t mention that rainbow on my blog - it’s just too much. But there it was. Then we passed a construction site and Charlie said, ‘Look! There’s a digger! Did you see it?’ and I said, ‘Well, no, I missed it, but I’ve seen diggers before.’ Surprisingly, he accepted that, and we drove on.

*

A few weeks back, we drove home from a party through the rain with a blue balloon.
The balloon pressed its head against the ceiling, then it leaned sideways so all I could see in the rear view mirror was blue.
Outside the car at home, Charlie reached for the balloon.
‘I’ll bring it inside,’ I said.
‘Give me the balloon,’ he said.
‘No, no.’ I was holding it tight. ‘I’ll carry it inside for you – or tie it to your wrist’, and he breathed in, calmly, ‘Just give it to me.’
We were standing on the footpath in the rain beside the open car door. I started talking. I said, ‘If you let go, this balloon will fly away,’ and he said, ‘Give it to me.’
I said: ‘Do you want—are you sure— ? If it slips out of your fingers, even for a second, it will go into the sky, and it will keep on going up, and you will never ever ever get it back. Do you understand?’

He reached out his hand. Bright blue balloon between us like a maypole, waiting to see what we would do.

I was thinking: he will lose it and he’ll cry, and he won’t understand that I can’t get it back for him. Like those sticks he used to collect in parks and when one snapped in half he would hand it to me and say, ‘Fix it.’

I was thinking: he might be able to hold onto it - he's three, his grip is getting stronger.

I was thinking: you have to let them make their own mistakes. It’s not a terrible loss, a balloon – maybe this is the best way to lose, feel loss, learn to move on—

Charlie reached his hand out, I gave him the balloon.

He lifted it up, opened out his fingers, and let it go.

Then, while my face gasped, his lit up, and he went wild with excitement. The balloon was skidding up into the sky, and Charlie was jumping up and down on the spot, laughing, watching it, chattering madly – ‘it’s going on a holiday!’ I heard him say. I looked up too. I started to see what he meant.

*

Afterwards, I wondered what happens to helium balloons when you let them go – whether they end up in orbit, millions of lost balloons in outerspace, or curve their way back to the ocean and get eaten by the whales. I did find some sites that said balloons may be choking the creatures of the sea. But then there was a study claiming most balloons will keep on rising until they reach a height at which they shatter. Then they’ll break into hundreds of tiny pieces, fall back to earth, and decay at the same rate as an oak leaf.

I suppose that when you let go of something, you have to try to do it the right way, the way that makes it shatter like glass then fall to the forest floor and disappear.

*

At the time, though, I was caught up in Charlie’s excitement — the balloon was going up but it was still itself, still blue — and I started to think about my Cello books, how I want there to be a girl, and she's sitting on a sloping roof in Cambridge, England, reading a book about Isaac Newton. Isaac and his falling apple, his glass prisms, his rainbows, and his fascination with things impossibly small, or impossibly large, or impossibly far away - while, at the same time, in the Kingdom of Cello, a boy in a dark grey woollen hat is walking across the white, white, snowy fields –

The balloon was going up, up, up, getting smaller, smaller, smaller, and we were laughing in amazement at the distance of it – that it could go so far, so fast, and get so small!

'Look, Charlie,' I said, 'you can still see it, it’s just a tiny speck but you can see it!' But then I turned and realised he'd stopped watching, he was heading for our front door to get in out of the rain.

30. There is Only One More Day in May

2010-05-30T22:53:00.007+10:00

I had lunch with a friend the other day and she was asking me what I’d been up to, and I said, well, one thing is, I’ve been blogging every day in May.

'I had to,' I explained. 'I made an announcement that I’d blog every day in May.'

I could tell she thought that was strange.

‘That’s strange,’ she said — that’s how I could tell – ‘Why would you do that?’

I didn't know, but I have just now remembered. It was:

1. to celebrate ten years in publishing and the release of The Ghosts of Ashbury High in North America on June 1;

2. to form a symbolic bridge from the Ashbury books to the Cello books; and

3. to cast a spell in order to let go of something — to let go of something that had started with an unkind review but had gathered itself into much more — a bird on my shoulder! — which I think was really fear.

Now, some people might think that a celebration, a bridge, and a spell are a lot to ask of the simple act of blogging every day. They might point out that it’s fairly standard, daily blogging, and that actually a lot of people do it in November!

Note, however, that November only has thirty days.

So, I am confident that all three items above have been— or, at least, that they will be achieved by the conclusion of tomorrow’s post.

Furthermore, it turns out the spell is going to have both retrospective and prospective effect! That is, it will apply to all the fears I have ever, or will ever, have. (So I won’t need to keep coming back to this blog and saying, listen! listen! I’m in trouble! – although I do hope to come back sometimes and say hello.)

In addition — and I hope you will be glad to hear this news — the spell is going to work on your fears too! Sweet and beautiful readers of this blog, I am so grateful to you for listening, and especially for your comments. They have been unimaginably generous, and yes, you people are treasures. (Also, two people I know have also been blogging-every-day-in May, one an old friend, the other new, so obviously, the spell should work for them, too, if they wish to take up this offer.)

Now, if you ever find yourself thinking, ‘hang on, that spell can't be working — I feel afraid!’ you just need to write a two-minute novel in questions on the topic of your fear/anxiety, and then you turn that novel into a paper aeroplane, and throw it as far as you can, and the spell will be rebooted, and you will never be afraid again.

So, that’s good news.

*

The other day, my neighbours gave me a jar of maple syrup — it can be tricky getting good maple syrup in Sydney, and the neighbours had just got some from Vermont, so they poured some into a little jar and gave it to me.

Living in Canada left me with three new addictions: snow, blueberries, and maple syrup. I don’t think the neighbours even know that!

On one side of my house, an angry dog and a broken fence; on the other side, unexpected, perfect gifts. Sometimes you just have to know which way to turn.

*

In other good news, last night my mother called and said she’d found a solution for my lower back pain! She said she was talking to a friend at Tai Chi about it – about my lower back – and turns out what I have to do is, I have to go into a pet store, any pet store, and ask them for this cream that people rub onto dogs and horses for their muscular problems.

This friend of my mother’s swears by it. Her husband used to have trouble just getting out of his chair and, as for a short walk to the shops, that was agony for him! 'But then he tried this cream, this dog and horse cream,' my mother’s friend explained, 'and now he gallops.'

29. Road Trip: The Way Back Home

2010-05-29T16:24:00.003+10:00

My friends and I rode bikes around the Western Plains Zoo, the children strapped into seats behind us. I was deeply moved by the field of rhinoceroses. Charlie liked it for a while, especially the meerkats, but he had a cold, his crankiness had manifested itself into a cold. He just wanted to be in the motel room really — you could open cupboards, drawers and curtains, fill glasses at the sink, jump on the beds – it was a giant playhouse. ‘I want to go back to my holiday,’ he said, every time we left the motel.

*

By the time we drove home three days later, his cold had gone to his chest, he was feverish and slept almost all the way. He was sleeping while I filled the car with petrol, sleeping while I pulled over to check the map, while I changed the music, stopped the music for quiet, saw another snake, more dead kangaroos, sleeping while I drove around trucks. He slept while I collected towns and villages for the Kingdom of Cello, and while I thought about how ostriches bury their heads in the sand but apparently they don’t.

In a busy town, I stopped at an intersection, and glanced left. There was the colourful playground with the lime green helicopter — the one he had wanted me to turn back for on the way to the holiday. The one he had promised to show me on the way home. I had taken the main highway after all so I could get him home faster. It seemed sad for a moment: that here we were beside that playground, stopped at a long red light, and he was asleep.

I looked in the rear view mirror at his sleeping face, the high pink in his cheeks, and he twitched suddenly, opened his eyes, blinked hard, yawned, turned left and said with quiet satisfaction: ‘There.’

So I pulled over, and he played in the colourful playground for an hour, and he seemed much brighter after his long sleep, and then we drove home.

28. A Two-Minute Novel in Questions

2010-05-28T22:00:00.003+10:00

Have you guessed? That there was a review? That, having learned over the years not to mind bad reviews, because my books are not perfect, and some people will notice that, and everybody’s different, and you-can’t-please-them-all, and some will misunderstand, some have different tastes — and fools all of them! but who cares? — having learned, in fact, not to read reviews at all — that still, one slipped through, slipped underneath my skin, and ended up standing on my shoulder!, where it stands now (I think), and leans in when I write, with its weight and its claws?

What if this review — a lengthy review! in a literary journal! by a woman! — what if this review said, amongst other unkind things, that Amelia was sexist! that it privileged the male and silenced women?! What if it assumed a jeering, sneering tone, and gave away the ending, all of the endings!, before concluding that, unfortunately, young people might read this book?

What if I read this review and laughed — paused, afraid a moment, considered it, dismissed it — and laughed again — but what if it kept finding its way back? Breaking down the fences? What if, even though it is a profound misreading, a misapplication of the theory, and can be countered at every turn — what if, despite this, the poison found its way into my head – like you’re stupid, or you’re plain – which is the way sometimes with untruths?

And what if it collected other voices — all the sneering voices of the past, especially my own (that voice from adolescence) — and what if it tangled these voices together, tightly, like a web, so that I could not write a word ?!

Are my metaphors getting themselves tangled here?

Well, but am I not tangled in confusion?!

Because shouldn’t I laugh (again), and flick it away? Talk about an issue that matters? How can so many generous reviews and comments — many that understand exactly what I set out to do with that book — so many beautiful readers! how can they all be erased by a single page of unkind words?!

Why am I doing this at all?! Did I not advise my defamation clients that: one hundred people might have seen this now, but if you sue then a thousand more will see it? What if nobody has even seen that review? What if this post is like a two-headed dragon laying hundreds of tiny dragon eggs?!

Is it revolution or foolishness to write this? Shouldn't you close the curtains on that spotlight? Aren't you supposed to hold it close - closer - never give your sadness away?
But is it cowardly to be silent?

Did I tell you that I googled this: ‘are bullfrogs —’ but google interrupted, thinking that I wondered whether bullfrogs might be:

poisonous
endangered
cold-blooded
edible
- or good pets?

That actually, what I wanted to know was whether they were bullies? And turns out they are — in the following way: that they sometimes eat the children of other, smaller frogs? And doesn’t that put things in perspective?

By which I mean to say, am I stretching the concept of a bully here?

Isn’t there a sliding scale, a continuum? From gentle mockery to critique to bad manners to cruelty — and wherever it falls, what do you do? Do you absorb it, turn away, or swing back? Stand tall, leave the school, roar, tell the teachers, say No!? And what do you do if it keeps coming? What if there is smirking and ‘the truth hurts, doesn’t it?’ even though it's actually not true?!

And if I met that reviewer, would I laugh, raise my eyebrows, be charming, indifferent, poisonous, cold, or would I laugh? Would I point out the errors, would my voice rise up in anger if I did? Should I strike back using words as weapons, or as tools, or paper cuts — or just as paper tigers?

Isn’t it a waste of time to write this? Did you know that Isaac Newton couldn’t cope with criticism? That he tried to ignore it, but couldn’t bear the foolishness, and often wasted several days responding in acerbic tones? That he sometimes announced he was giving up science since the critics drove him mad?! Did you know that he invented Calculus? Did you know that someone else said that they’d invented it? That an impartial Report detailed this dispute, and found, conclusively, that Isaac was the one — that this report was followed quickly by an anonymous review, praising the impartial Report?
That the impartial Report and the anonymous Review were both written by Isaac himself?

(Do you realise I am not here in any way suggesting that I am comparable to Newton?)

Also, there is this, that perhaps the bird isn’t really there? Have I mentioned that I once saw an ear specialist, who tested my ears and said that, no, I was not slightly deaf — that what I had was an illusion of deafness?

But what if I feel as bruised as an apple that has fallen from a shopping bag?!

What if the bird leans in and tells me that whatever I write, it will be judged, misjudged, misread, and misunderstood?

What if I find myself (absurdly) compelled to defend my own feminism?! To refer to the fact that I grew up yearning for stronger girls in books, that I studied women’s literature, and gender and the law, that I’ve read all the theory, that my novels have strong, complex girls in the lead roles?!

That when I was in fourth grade, we were told to write letters to the Australian armed forces, requesting information on careers (strange!), that my letter said I’d like to be a pilot, that the reply said, ‘Actually, there are no lady pilots, but here’s some information on nursing,’ while all around the fourth grade boys opened envelopes filled with aeroplanes?

That an aunt once laughed at me and said: ‘There will never be women commentators on the radio; their voices are not pleasant to the ear’?

What if, when I was twelve years old, a teacher, talking about public speaking, mentioned, in an off-hand way, that she did not like the sound of my voice, and that it could be a disadvantage for me in public speaking? So that, for the next year or so, I tried to speak as little as I could, if at all?

Why do women silence other women?

And will this be enough to let it go? The bird, or the poison, or the tangle of voices? Whatever we decide to call it?

(Well, isn’t it a fact that they’re almost gone now anyway — that this blogging has just about worked? And am I not at this moment thinking, 'don't do it! don't publish this!' while another voice says archly, 'yes, you will!"?)

This has taken me longer than two minutes, hasn’t it, and it’s tricky, isn’t it, to write in questions?

Unfortunately, young people might read this book. What a thing to say.

27. Road Trip: the Fountains in Orange

2010-05-27T21:43:00.003+10:00

Goanna in the centre of the road — a snake shifting suddenly, long, long coils of snake — birds swooping overheard — and, ‘Look!’ I kept saying. ‘Look, Charlie!’ until I stopped saying it, because each time he would miss it. 'What? What? Where is the bird?!' – getting angrier – 'Where?'

Signs with pictures of kangaroos and wombats, 'Look out for kangaroos!' I told him, and he said, 'Where? Where?' and I said, 'Well, we just have to look out for them — they’re not —' then he noticed one of the signs himself, and said,
'That’s not a kangaroo' — withering — 'that’s just a a picture of a kangaroo.'

Once, he tried to point something out to me — a colourful playground with a lime green helicopter — but then the lights changed, and I drove on through that town. He didn’t believe that I’d seen it. 'Look, LOOK!' he said, and I said, 'I know! I saw!' And he said, 'No, you didn’t, you were looking ahead!' I said, 'No, really, I saw it. In my peripheral vision.'

We were back on the highway by now, and he was saying, ‘Turn around! Turn around so you can see it!’ But I wouldn’t. Eventually, he sighed and said, ‘Never mind, I will show it to you on the way home,’ which was unexpected - I didn't even know he understood the concept of the way home.

The journey home would be three days from now, and he was likely to have forgotten by then, and even if he hadn't, he would probably miss it, and all that was setting aside the fact that I was planning on taking a different route home.

'Okay. Good idea,' I said.

*

The drive to Dubbo is about five hours, but it took us eight because we stopped in parks, and for milkshakes. Charlie was in a mood, to do with me having brought the suitcases along on his holiday.

Every time we stopped, he would climb out of the car, sleepily, moodily, and ask, ‘Is this my holiday?’

There was confusion at a park in Orange, where they had fountains, and a couple of birds in cages. ‘This is my holiday,’ he informed me. ‘See, that’s the zoo.’ He was furious when I told him it wasn’t. I asked a man in a suit, with a pleasant face, if there was a café nearby.

At once, the man exclaimed, ‘Yes! Yes, as a matter of fact there is a café near here, and it’s a very lovely one, too! It’s in a nursery, it’s called Anything Grows, and it’s just half a block from here!’

It was exactly as if he’d been wandering the paths of these gardens, this tranquil park, by the cages of parrots and the fountains, waiting and wandering, waiting for somebody to ask for a café. I wondered if he knew, or loved, or was the owner of the Anything Grows Café.

In the last hours of the trip, I saw dead kangaroos, eight or nine of them, on the side of the road. I didn’t point these out to Charlie.

But, 'Look at the beautiful sunset!' I said, and he said, 'That’s not a sunset, that’s a sky. That’s just the sky.'

'Do you kow what a sunset is?' I said, and he became very quiet. After a moment, he said, 'What’s a sunset?'

I explained, I tried to explain, but he lost interest

*

Then we arrived at the motel, and friends were waiting for us, a barbecue already laid out on the picnic table, their children dark shadows in the darkening playground.

I said, 'this is your holiday,' and 'look, there’s a frog' – a green frog in the stairwell — and he said, where? where? where? and I stopped him, crouched him down, turned his head, pointed it out, and he said, ‘Oh, yeah. It’s a frog.’

26. In which I am suddenly Ranting! and going on! about Rain, Reviews, Bullies, and Blankets

2010-05-26T22:24:00.005+10:00

Rainy today.
Yesterday, after Charlie’s afternoon sleep, he just wanted to sit on the couch with me for a while, holding his threadbare yellow blanket. He told me he likes to put his fingers in the holes in his blanket, and I said, I wish I had a blanket because then I could put my fingers in the holes too. That pleased him, and we spent some time imagining that everybody had a blanket; we went through all the people we know, and imagined each one with yellow blankets. Then he said, imagine if everybody was a yellow blanket. And he said, imagine if everybody was a tv, and then, imagine if everybody was a light so we had to come in and switch them on! And then he said imagine if everyone was a kiss.

*

I finally read The Consolation of Philosophy by Alain de Botton, a few weeks back, and then I had a beautiful, lulling sense that I now understood philosophy. All of it.

It was like the time that I listened to that Beginners French CD, and believed that I was fluent in French.

They both – Alain de Botton, and the narrator of my French CD – they both had gentle, authoritative voices, voices that coax you along, murmuring, ‘You see?’—voices that hold out their hands so that butterflies of fact can gently rise and just as gently land inside your ears before slipping gracefully into your brain.

I came to my computer, wanting more of this wise and gentle man, this Alain de Botton, and googled him, wondering what else he could teach me in his thoughtful, soothing voice, and the first thing I found was that, recently, somebody had published a negative review of his work, and he had responded:

I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.

*

Here’s something I think: that in many ways, young adults are brighter than adults, but adults often think the opposite.

It’s something that I notice in certain reviews of young adult fiction.

There are adult issues in this book so young people will not be interested/will not understand, reviewers say.
Are you mad! Do you think that young people don’t want to know about the world that they live in?! Do you think they are not affected every day by adult issues?! That they aren’t getting prepared to take them on?!

Or else: No young adult would ever say this/behave like this/ do this.
Actually, young adults will do and say and behave in as many ways as adults do. They’re just as various, only younger.

Once, someone wrote in a review of one of my books: No young person would be able to write as well as the characters in this book.

I just laughed at that. I kind of wished that it was true. But the fact is, young writers are often better than adult writers. I get e-mails from young people that can make me cry and laugh in a paragraph - that have imagination, imagery, and intelligence all sewn up. I’ve read the blogs of teenagers and thought: ‘Why? Why am I writing for young adults? They do it so much better themselves.'

The only reason they're not writing the books is that they're too bright, and they're moving too fast. They don't stop for long enough to finish novels.

My youngest sister was playing her DS brain game the other day, and she got depressed because the DS told her that her mental age was twelve years older than she actually is. So that made her my age. That meant she was stupid. On DS, the aim is to be younger. DS knows how to respect the young!

I felt kind of disrespected though.

*

I’m thinking of the writer I met the other day who mentioned a review: this book should be pulped, and so should the person who wrote it.

One of the many things I like about Justine Larbalestier’s blog is that she has a rule: no disrespecting living authors.
Sometimes I think reviewers are disrespectful because they’re insecure. When you review a book, you’re setting yourself up as a person in position to judge – that troubles some reviewers: maybe they suspect they’re not in that position. So they have to puff themselves up like bullfrogs — talk about how well-read they are, use esoteric language — or stomp all over the book’s head.

Or else, they might be disrespectful because they think it’s good writing — to mock, sneer and jeer is entertaining. It’s a cheap, easy way to entertain.
Actually, it’s bullying.

*

I’ve been thinking about bullying, too.
The kind that involves insults, I mean.
A while back, somebody commented on this blog and said that her high school headmistress had once said to her: ‘You will always be the plainest person in the room.’ (The commenter added, ‘It’s true, too, I am.’)

It’s been three weeks since the boys in the park called him ‘stupid’, and Charlie still says to me, now and then, ‘I’m not stupid, am I, Mummy?’

Personal insults! You often believe them. They can get right inside your head. And the same goes for the sneering, jeering voice that bullies often use.

So, I’ve been wondering how you’re supposed to deal with bullies. I found a website on the topic, that said, ‘Stand tall’ and ‘Eat more healthy snacks’ and ‘Have a shower before you go to school’. It also suggested you say in a loud voice, ‘No! Stop that!’ before walking or running away.

So, there’s that approach.

There’s also the school of thought that you see in movies, that says the answer is to fight back hard. Take secret lessons in karate! Practise boxing with your dad out the back! And then, the next time you see the bully, knock them unconscious.
They’ll look at you with fresh admiration (once they come to) and you might even end up as friends.
But what happens if you just make them madder? And what about when you get arrested?

Neither approach would help with a headmistress who tells you you’re not pretty — that kind of thing, you don’t even know that it is bullying at the time.

So, I don’t know. I don’t know how to deal with bullies. I’m thinking, the only solution is to ask them. What would make you stop? That’s what we have to do: ask the bullies.

*

I read somewhere that Alain de Botton apologised for his response to that review — or at least, for putting it online (he’d meant it just to go to the reviewer).
It was intended as a verbal punch, he said.
The reviewer had suggested that de Botton, personally, had been mean-spirited in his book, and he wanted to impress upon the reviewer how much that had hurt.
He must subscribe to that ‘fight back hard’ school of thought.

But writers are not supposed to fight back at all! They’re supposed to accept reviews with dignified silence.
It’s so entrenched, this rule, that when a writer does hit back, there’s an embarrassed kind of sympathy, or scorn, or disapproval.

I don’t know if responding is the right thing to do. I doubt that angry threats are the solution. Even calm, reasoned responses are, mostly, a waste of the writer’s time: even though the writer is the expert — the one who knows the book better than anybody — nobody else believes that. The writer is too subjective, too caught up, and the book belongs to the public sphere.

More to the point, vicious or unkind reviews are just not seen as bullying.
They’re seen as critics doing their job: and critics should be free to say exactly what they want! That’s how criticism works! It’s how things get better! It’s robust and open discussion! Freedom of speech!

I think, actually, it’s not. Viciousness never made a writer improve. This book should be pulped, and so should its author. I doubt that that improved the writer’s writing.

The only solution that I can see here is a revolution.

I don’t mean critics should praise everything, or that we all have to get yellow security blankets, or that everyone has to be a kiss.

I just mean, if you criticise, do it with respect, and without sneering, and without getting personal. Have some freakin manners. That’s all I mean.

(And if you’re a schoolteacher, never tell someone that they’re plain. What a thing to say.)

25. On Writing in Letters and Notes

2010-05-25T22:46:00.004+10:00

I saw Sarah Jessica Parker being interviewed by Oprah once, and she was talking about her five-year-old son. She said, ‘Oh, having him around, we just learn something new every day.’ And Oprah said, ‘Really? Like what?’ Sarah Jessica didn’t know what to say. I think she’d been expecting Oprah to say, ‘I can imagine!’ or ‘Yeah, kids are dynamite, aren’t they?’ or ‘We could all do with that sort of wisdom these days — maybe he should run for president!’ That sort of thing. But no, it was just, ‘how so?’

Poor SJP.

It’s strange, I wouldn’t remember either. Charlie skates such a fine line between genius and dreamlike madness. The things he says slide out of my mind as they happen.

Luckily, though, I sometimes write them here. If Oprah ever asks me, ‘How so?’ about Charlie, I won’t falter, I’ll just give her the link.

*

One thing I remember. He started playing shops one day and he said, ‘Do you want to buy something?’ and I was feeling a bit whimsical, I said, ‘Well, do you have any happiness?’ and right away, he said, ‘No. But we’ve got apples.’

*

That little story — the happiness/apples one — it feels like something I could sell to a minister of religion, doesn’t it. To use as a human interest anecdote, and they’d get a quiet, grateful laugh from the congregation, and then they’d stretch it out into a metaphor for something spiritual, bridge it over to the bible, lose the congregation, drift off into abstraction.

*

With Feeling Sorry for Celia, the first Ashbury book, I didn’t intend for it to be epistolary. There were a lot of letters, sure – between the girls, from imaginary associations, notes on the fridge from the mother – but these were all embedded in a third person narrative. After a few pages of writing, though, I noticed that the narrative was getting thinner, like a diminishing lattice pastry, and I thought, why is it even there?

I thought: I’m going to see if I can do without it!

It was kind of an exciting moment. Stepping out of the narrative. Setting out on my own! Breaking loose! I took away the pastry shell and the pie kept its shape!

This happened in the computer room at Cambridge. For a moment I felt I had done something revolutionary, then I remembered that epistolary novels have been around for a bit.

Anyway, after that, I became addicted to the format. Partly, it’s because I like to take things to pieces, write into the fragments, and see what shape they start to take. Partly it's because I've always loved an unreliable narrator. Letters are neither reliable nor static; they’re designed to fly through the air and gently fall into the recipient’s lap like a gift, or hit the recipient in the eye. If a teacher asked students to write letters to a neighbouring school, as part of an assignment, you couldn't trust the students to be honest or to be themselves. When you have six students writing letters, you get multiple, intersecting, unreliable narrators.

In Amelia/Ghosts, there are exams, history, and blogs, and I think that, for their own reasons, these are even less reliable than letters. When you write an exam, you're conscious that you're writing for authority, and being graded. (So when Emily says that watching Riley and Amelia act was like having sex with strangers, she suddenly remembers she’s in an exam, and feels compelled to add that she’s not that kind of girl.)

Most of all, though, I like the spaces in between. Once, when I was a lawyer, I was going through a box of documents for a case, piecing the story together. There was a long, long chain of dull, procedural letters and documents, typed, stamped, formatted, in high-brow legalese. Then, suddenly — startlingly — a small hand-written note. The ink was pale blue; the script neat and curling. It had been written by an elderly woman, a minor character in a huge, complex, corporate case, and her note said, ‘this has made my life something of a disaster’ and, ‘perhaps I could prevail on you to help?’

Immediately after her note, the typed documents were back: dry, formal, remote. There was no response to the woman. That silence— that’s where the real story was.

24. On Dreaming of Amelia/ The Ghosts of Ashbury High

2010-05-24T22:23:00.005+10:00

Charlie has a new friend: it’s a baby hyena; it was lying in our backyard; it’s small and round, a lot like a kids’ rubber ball.

‘I wonder if there are any other animals in the backyard,’ he said, and handed me the blue-and-yellow plastic tube - the telescope - to check.

‘There’s a polar bear!’ I said—and he gasped, ‘Really? I love polar bears!,’ and took the telescope from me, looked through it briefly, and at once shook his head. ‘No, that’s just a regular bear, not a polar bear.’ Authoritative. Disappointed. He put the telescope down, and returned to his chat with his hyena.

*

Amelia/Ghosts started when I was eight months pregnant — just back from Canada, staying with my parents out in Castle Hill, a suburb in the north west of Sydney. The horizon is lined with the Blue Mountains. Often, my mother says, ‘Look how blue the mountains are today! I don’t think I’ve ever seen them quite so blue!’

The idea for the book came from: a teenage couple I saw crossing the road near the Castle Hill cinema; a girl who stopped me in the street one day and said, ‘Excuse me, where is here?’; and the ghosts who live just beyond my parents’ backyard.

I wrote it while I was living in Neutral Bay—it’s a fifteen minute ferry ride from the city, and we moved there just before Charlie was born.

It was a whole different writing experience. Used to be, I’d write for a few minutes then spin my chair away from the computer, get up, and go out for a coffee. Used to be, the plot unfurled while I lay in bed in a half-awake state every morning.

But now there was a baby, and—unexpectedly, from the day that he was four weeks old — just me and the baby. Unexpected! The shock still clatters in my head like the jingle sticks at Charlie’s music class!

Anyway, I wrote it while Charlie was sleeping, or while a babysitter came by for a few hours, three afternoons a week. As soon as I got him to sleep, I ran to my computer to work. As soon as the babysitter arrived, I either ran to the computer, or I ran up the hill to the café to get air, to plot with coloured textas, to read gothic novels, and literature on the gothic, to research convict history, and to read about drumming and woodwork.

These were the smallest spaces I ever had to work in—it felt like reversing into a narrow parking space while traffic is rushing towards you.

Before writing each character, I listened to his or her song. Toby’s song was Closing Time by Leonard Cohen. Lydia’s was Trapeze Swinger by Iron and Wine. I didn’t have a song for Emily, because I didn’t think I’d like her taste in music.

*

Whenever I had time to think, I tried to gather all the characters and plot strands into my head, and see if I could braid them together. Once, I was walking up the hill to the café, watching the road, mind wandering, and I thought, sternly: Look away from the road. Think about Riley. So I did, I looked away from the road, and thought of Riley, and as I did, I sensed something was wrong — something odd about the road — and just as I turned sideways to look, a cyclist crashed into the side of a taxi cab and flew through the air.

Her collarbone was broken in three places. The taxi driver said it was her fault. She said it was his. I was the only witness. And the facts that mattered — the moment that counted — was the moment I had turned from the road.

I sensed something was wrong, I said in the courtroom, there was an oddness at the edge of my eye. The judge was unimpressed.

*

It was the best time I ever had writing a novel. I’ve never felt so close to my characters, nor been so excited about the ideas that I wanted to explore. I wanted to write about Amelia and Riley, two new students who have come to Ashbury High. It was my way of putting the ‘bad’ kids from Brookfield in the same room as the ‘lucky’ kids of Ashbury. I wanted to write about the terrible things that can happen to people when other people, misguidedly, try to help them; the fact that no ‘troubled’ person will ever be the passive, grateful recipient of charity that the idealistic want them to be; that people are always complex and active with plans of their own.

I loved the first person accounts I was reading of Australian and Irish history; I loved the mischievous drift of gothic literature from solemn to self-parody and back again; I loved the idea of a spectrum of flawed motherhood, and of truth, of past falling into future, of hope blending with imagination; a spectrum of betrayal and forgiveness — the things you can forgive, the things you can’t.
And also I wanted to write about ghosts.

*

Mostly though, I liked the way my days worked when I was writing this book.
I spent mornings playing with Charlie in parks or at the beach; and most afternoons, writing. In the café, I drank fruits-of-the-forest tea and ate dark chocolate rocky road.

There were difficult days — days when he wouldn’t sleep and he’d call from his cot, and I’d call back, ‘You have to sleep! I have to pay the rent!’ — and days when I was too tired to write or think; and the whole three years that I was writing the book were shadowed with the shock of that loss.

But, also — at the exact same time — the three years were alight with happiness and wonder; a baby turning into a person.

Writing while a baby is sleeping in the next room — or while he is playing downstairs with a babysitter — is the happiest writing I have done.
I've been very, very lucky with babysitters, and in a way, the story of the writing of Amelia/Ghosts is the story of them. So this is where I'll finish.

There was A, the original lovely babysitter, an English girl with a gentle voice, who rugged him up in blankets, and pushed his pram up the hill; when she flew away we met E, who became more than ‘babysitter,’ she’s a part of the family, and has been with us ever since — a finance student with a perfect instinct for children and what they need, she takes him to the soccer field to kick the ball around; she gave him gum boots so on rainy days they go on long puddle walks; she noticed that the wheels of his trike were on back-to-front and, the following week, arrived with a wrench, and fixed them for him.

Along the way, there has also been C, a New Zealand opera singer, who filled the house with her rendition of the Hokey-Pokey (it was around this time that Charlie started getting a confused, discontented look on his face whenever I sang, and eventually asked me to stop), and took him on ‘adventures’ to find motorbikes, spiders, and boats. There was also T, the only boy, who had imaginary sword fights with him; another C, who let him dig in her garden, and pick cherry tomatoes from her vine; G, who makes caterpillars out of egg cartons; and M, who arrives with charcoal, paper, and giant coffee-table art books.

*

One of my favourite memories is this: I was in my study working on Amelia/Ghosts; my study window overlooks the backyard. Charlie was sitting on the back patio with his opera-singer babysitter, and I could hear the murmur of their voices. I had just been downstairs to get a cup of tea, so I knew what they were doing out there. They were rescuing a beetle: a beetle cocooned so tightly and comprehensively in a spider’s web, that you couldn’t tell it was a beetle at all. They were slowly, methodically, untangling it. In the end, they set it free.

23. On putting the jug of water on the floor, instead of on the desk, so I won’t spill it over the computer

2010-05-23T22:35:00.002+10:00

Do you ever write a text or e-mail, and then a voice in your head says, urgently: Don’t send that! – you’ll regret it – whatever you do, don’t send that! While another voice is raising its eyebrows archly: I’m going to, you know! And so you send it. Your heart thudding.

Also, in the future, do you think that mobile phones will split into pieces when you drop them, and fry when they get wet in the rain? Will computers crash when you spill coffee on them?

Getting up suddenly – remembering something I had to do downstairs — the jug of water on the floor flew sideways. A gushing flood of water over cords and electrical outlets and tangled modems and wireless routers. The rush and shock of it!

I got them all up out of the way. Turned off the power at the wall. Put some towels down, opened the window. It was all fine in the end. Not such a big deal. But at the time!

*

Charlie running alongside me down the hill, saying, ‘Go, go, go’ and instructing me to do the same. Then he pauses, glances up at me: ‘I just have to stop and swallow the water.’ After a moment I realise he means the build-up of saliva. Most people, they just swallow that.

At breakfast, eating toast, he remarks, friendly, ‘I don’t like the black crunchy bits.’ A lot of people, in that situation, they'd tell me I'd burnt the toast.

A while ago, I put all his soft toys – teddies, puppies, snowmen, cows – in a bag and hung it from the living room door handle. I wondered when he would notice they were missing. Days went by, and then the bag caught his eye. He looked inside, busy and curious, then nodded, once, and murmured to himself: 'Everybody’s in here.’

22. Smiling, distracted

2010-05-22T22:39:00.007+10:00

Windows over darling harbour, tall ships, a submarine, and the yacht that a teenage girl just sailed around the world.

There were four writers – two men, two women – and a group of girls, all around the table. They were beautiful listeners, the girls. Once, a few of them smiled, distracted, but it was only that a dragon was passing behind the glass.

‘I wouldn’t dress up in that,’ said someone, ‘if you paid me a million dollars.’
I would. It was a sparkling, colourful dragon suit. It was magical! I would like to wear it to a cocktail party. I would wear it to water the garden!

But only if someone was likely to look over the fence and say, 'Look at you! You're a dragon!'

‘Once you have written your novel,’ said a writer, ‘it is no longer yours.’ He was talking about criticism, and how you have to learn to take it. He told how a reviewer once said, of one of his books: this should be pulped, and so should the person who wrote it.
Which was fine, he said. He didn’t mind that.
I would have. I would have minded a lot.
Another writer said that she had read that very book and loved it.
‘I’m glad that some people liked it,’ he said, ‘but—’
‘Not liked it,’ corrected the writer. ‘Loved it.’

It was good to hear what the other three writers had to say. They were all sensible and smart, and made me want to read their books.

Someone asked about names. Do you need to get the names of your characters right before you begin. Someone asked about character development. Then someone said: look, is there a publisher—is there one particular publisher you can go to—who will—who is most likely just to publish your book, and get it right?

It seemed to me to be a perfect question. What is all this talk of criticism, character, dialogue, and polishing! Just tell me where to go to be a writer! It was oddly soothing, the question, like saying: I see there are many coloured doors that I could take in life from this point — please stop describing the various paths to the doors, and tell me. Just tell me. Which one — which one goes direct to happiness?

Everyone was quiet for a moment.

Eventually, one of the writers said: You will get rejected. Probably several times.
You will knock on the wrong door. You will be unhappy. Maybe over and over.

I didn’t mention the writer I once met whose first novel was accepted by all five of the publishers he sent it to. That's unusual.

Later, the youngest writer at the table said, ‘Writers these days are getting younger.’
And the other female writer — who was older — said briskly, ‘And older too.’
‘I didn’t mean—’ said the young writer, ‘I’m just saying — that they are.’

I hope writers these days are getting younger. I took the ferry home thinking: I hope I’m getting younger.

21. The children of the Netherlands

2010-05-21T21:10:00.006+10:00

Lately I’ve been wondering how I'm going to pay the rent next month.
Wondering idly. A low level wondering.
I’ve kept the wonder idle because a friend once told me that money worries can cause back pain.

Turns out, I couldn’t trick my lower back. Most of my back hasn’t had a clue about the money worries, but the lower part, it started right up — it started up in an angry, loud way like somebody playing the bagpipes down there. There’s not enough space in my lower back for the bagpipes.

I tried to say, no, no, don’t worry! I’ll find a way to pay the rent! Remember last year when we were so worried, and the children of the Netherlands saved us? They’d been buying my books, and they sent me an unexpected royalty cheque, and it saved the day! I love them so much, those children of the Netherlands.

But the lower back was unimpressed and kept on worrying.

Yesterday, the funniest thing. I found out I’m getting a tax refund!—and that’s going to save the day.

I am happy, and feel some affection, but I find I do not love them, the people of the tax office.

Anyhow, but here's the strange thing. Even with that money worry solved, my lower back has kept on with its frenzy.

‘And it keeps you awake at night?’ said my mother on the phone.
‘When Charlie lets me sleep,’ I said, ‘yes, it keeps me awake.’
‘That doesn’t sound right,’ she said. ‘It’s probably your kidneys!’

So we were back at the doctor’s today.

The doctor checked Charlie’s ears for free. ‘Are your ears better?’ she asked him, as an aside. ‘No,’ he said. So she looked. ‘Almost better,’ she said.

Then she made me stand and bend in different directions. Sometimes it really hurt! She kept apologising for that, but I didn’t think she should. I thought she should be proud. It was like she knew how to play it, my lower back pain.

‘Well, it’s certainly not your kidneys!’ she said, sitting back down at her desk.

Then she said it was because we stood up.

‘We used to go about on all fours,’ she explained, ‘but we went and decided to stand up. We shouldn’t have. But we did.’

So that’s why I have that lower back pain.

I got a lolly snake, because I was the patient, but I was allowed to give it to somebody else, the doctor said. That was her way of telling me to give it to Charlie.

*

Listen, I’ve got a split lip. It just now happened. Charlie flying across the bed to throw himself into my arms – some kind of a miscalculation. His forehead is all right. We talked about that a bit. I offered to kiss it better and was glad he didn’t accept because my lip was hurting in a sparky kind of way, like someone had lined up some tiny little fireworks there. I read him a story, and we chatted, and Charlie made absolutely no mention of anything odd about my face. Then I went downstairs and saw myself in the mirror. My lip is all kind of torn and bloody! It looks great. But I’m participating in a panel on creative writing tomorrow, and I don’t want to look great!

What do you do, do you put ice on it or what?

And why did Charlie not mention it? Politeness, I guess. You should see my lip! He may have been embarrassed for me.

20. Strange

2010-05-20T20:40:00.005+10:00

Strange dreamstate today. The ferry to the city was quiet. I met a visiting New York author at Sailor’s Thai. It was all so gentle and sleepy.

Since that ear infection a few weeks back, Charlie has been waking every night around two to call, ‘I’m very, very sad in my bed.’ He means he wants to come into my bed.

We were back at the doctor’s yesterday, and she said: It’s the shape of their skulls. ‘Kids at this age, they get them all the time,’ she said. Ear infections, she means; his is back. ‘We’ll give you that antibiotic again,' she said, 'it’s the best thing for ears,’ and I said, ‘Well, do you have something that tastes better?’

We picked up the new medicine, and the pharmacist gave Charlie a gift: a small, rubber, two-headed dragon. He held it in both hands, and gazed at it.

‘I’m glad that’s gone to a good home!’ said the pharmacist. ‘The last two children I tried to give it to didn’t want it! It freaked them out.’

Back home, I took the medicine out of the box and said, ‘Look! It’s pink!’ and we both laughed hilariously for a while. It’s pink!

It was so funny that he decided to try it. His eyes lit up and he asked for more.

This morning he wanted to do it by himself; in his enthusiasm, he pushed the end of the dropper before it got into his mouth and the pink flew everywhere, streaking across his blanket, his pyjamas, my pyjamas, the couch, his hair, my hair. We both laughed hard. But I said I might do it from now on.

On the phone, my mother asked what it was called, the new antibiotic, and I said Ceclor Suspension, and there was a pause, and she said, ‘Well, it sounds like it knows what it’s doing.’

He slept in my bed last night, and some time in the night I woke to the sound of him asking, very friendly, ‘Can you turn on the light? I want to look at my ankle.’ Later, to the sound of him asking, also friendly, ‘Can you pass me my two-headed dragon?’ I passed it to him from the bedside table. Three or four times, he needed water, and another three or four times, he needed my help to find his blanket, lost and tangled somewhere in the sheets. ‘I’m just hugging my beautiful, soft, two-headed dragon,’ he let me know later, halfway to a dream. ‘Okay,’ I said.

When he did sleep, he drifted over to my side of the bed; finding me there, he would push me hard with both feet towards the edge, and finding that I resisted this, he would wake and say, very friendly, ‘You’re in my way, can you please go on the floor?’

*

Today, the dragon’s belly split down the middle, and tiny white styrofoam balls began to spill from it. Charlie asked me to fix it. I said, ‘Maybe these are dragon eggs! Little tiny dragon babies will come out of these eggs!’

He looked at me hard and then looked away again, an expression of mild, complicated disappointment on his face. ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘These are not dragon eggs.’

*

The visiting New York author told me about the sessions he has coming up at the Sydney Writers' Festival. He was engaging and articulate. I felt oddly euphoric in my dreamstate, and also strangely sad - festivals seemed so far away suddenly - impossible.

*

Just now, I held the two-headed dragon over the kitchen bin and squeezed it, and they all spilled out, hundreds and hundreds of tiny dragon eggs. A few clung onto the inside of the dragon, and these I rinsed down the sink. The dragon is drying on the dish rack: she is more or less herself.

19. On Bindy Mackenzie

2010-05-19T18:47:00.008+10:00

Bindy was a character who turned up near the end of Finding Cassie Crazy/Year of Secret Assignments. Nobody at Ashbury liked her but my sister, Liane, loved her. She said to me: ‘I can’t wait to read the next Ashbury book. I want to find out more about Bindy.’

I hadn’t been planning to write another Ashbury book. Nor anything else about Bindy, actually. But it was one of those situations where somebody kind, but misinformed, arrives at your place for dinner and says, ‘I’m really looking forward to your sticky date pudding,’ and after a moment of confused dismay, you run into the kitchen and make one.

*

I was walking along St Catherine, in Montreal, Canada, trying to decide how to write a book about the least popular girl in the school. At the intersection with St Laurent it was suddenly clear: it would have to be a murder mystery.

I wrote my murder mystery in an apartment in Old Montreal. It had stone walls, blue-framed windows, terracotta floor tiles, and a fireplace. The apartment I mean, not the book. From my window, I could look down on the pianist who played in the doorway of the Polish restaurant on the corner. I went to Olive & Gourmando, a nearby café, to drink café au lait, eat apple-cinnamon brioche, and read about poisonous animals for research. And I planned the story in my head while I skated on the pond down the road.

About Montreal: I never stopped loving the snow and ice. People are often critical of snow. Their hearts sink when they see it coming. I understand their point, but I feel the same defensive love for snow as I do for Bindy Mackenzie. Poor Bindy! Poor snow! It’s not their fault they can be so annoying. They are both so exuberant! And they mean well.

18. Snappy Colours

2010-05-18T20:34:00.003+10:00

Reading the Snappy Colours story, and we get to the purple bat, and Charlie says, ‘Have you ever slept upside down in a tree, Mummy?’ and I have to answer, honestly: ‘No.’ Then he gathers toys to ask. The poison dart frog, the little ceramic moose, the yellow digger. ‘Have you ever slept upside down in a tree?’ he asks them, one at a time, and I have to reply on their behalf, pick them up, bob them up and down in the air, put on a funny voice: ‘No. Have you?’ And Charlie says, ‘No, I haven’t,’ and explains to each of his toys in turn, pointing to his bare feet in pyjamas, ‘I can’t hook my feet over the branches, see?’

17. Road trip: the suitcases

2010-05-17T21:03:00.005+10:00

A while back we played holiday each day, with the suitcases, the small suitcases with handles and wheels, pulling them along, and then dragging them up into imaginary helicopters, aeroplanes, ships, cars, spaceships, diggers and cranes, and then one day, it was a real holiday.
We were going on a road trip to the Western Plains Zoo.
I packed the small suitcases.
Charlie offered to pull them to the car, but finding them too heavy and awkward, even to get along the front hall, he decided we should leave them at home.
‘Take them back upstairs,’ he commanded. ‘We will go to my holiday without them.’
We brought them though. It took him a long time to forgive me for that.

16. This happened today

2010-05-16T21:39:00.006+10:00

I haven’t been to many baby showers; but I like party games.
I went to my sister-in-law’s baby shower today. Everyone was given a blue necklace on arrival and the game was, you weren’t allowed to say the word ‘baby’. If you did, and someone else noticed, they could take your necklace.
I was surprised to find that I said the word ‘baby’ very early on. Nobody noticed though. I said, ‘Oh, I just said it,’ and some of my sisters went to take my necklace, but I said, actually, no, I think you have notice it yourself, and I kept my necklace.

After a while, someone brought out three baby bottles: one with orange juice, one with apple juice, and one with water. Three people were going to be chosen and the game was, they’d have to race each other to finish the bottles.
I thought: Well, no, that’s a game I wouldn’t want to play. No. I would never want to drink out of a baby’s bottle in front of everybody. That’s just – it’s just not dignified.

Everybody’s name was in a small plastic bag. They were going to choose the three contestants from the bag. I felt glad that I wouldn’t have to play this game. There were about 25 people there, so no chance my name would be called. I was interested though, to see how the three people would cope.

Two names were drawn, and everybody cried out and laughed and pointed to those two people. They had to go forward and sit on chairs at the front, and take a bottle each.
Then another name was drawn, and everybody said, oh, she’s not here. And another name, and that girl was exempted because she was filming the event with the video camera.
That’s when I got that uneasy feeling. I started to think of The Hunger Games. How the little sister’s name was called, and it was, like, what are the chances?! But it happened.

One more name was drawn from the bag. And it was mine.

Everything got hazy for a moment. I couldn’t hear or think straight. I don’t remember how I got to the chairs at the front, or who handed me the baby bottle. I just know that, when my vision cleared, there I was.
None of my sisters volunteered to take my place.

I thought: okay, the only thing to do here is win this.
As far as I could see, it was the only thing.

I got the apple juice. The woman on my left had the orange juice. She was older, and was making jokes in Portuguese. She unscrewed the lid of the bottle, and went to drink it like that, straight from the bottle, instead of through the teat, and I felt wonderful relief — of course, why not?! – but everybody shouted at her until she replaced the lid. On my right was a girl with long dark hair, and a baby bottle full of water. She was laughing and joking too, but there was a determined flash in her eyes. She was the one to beat.

Before I had a chance to figure out a strategy, someone said ‘okay, go’ and it was happening. We were all drinking from baby bottles. There was so much shouting and cheering! I think people were trying to advise me, but what were they saying? I tried to focus and all I could hear was, ‘drink it! drink it!’ and something about holding the bottle high so no air bubbles got in. But I couldn’t really distinguish the words. Sometimes I stopped and had a short break. I’ve seen babies do that. And I needed to check how fast the level was going down. Slowly. So slowly. It was unbelievable how much apple juice was in there. I tried tipping the bottle as high as I could, but it made no difference.

The woman with the orange juice was taking a lot of long breaks, laughing and talking. She wasn’t a concern. But the girl with the water — she was good. Her focus was extraordinary. And she had a team of supporters gathered around her, some of them actually tapping the bottle to make the liquid come out faster for her. My sisters were just sitting there, way across the room, laughing at me.

Every time I looked up I saw the video camera pointed at me.

The girl with the water was making excellent progress. My apple juice was never-ending. Her water was almost all gone. It was getting lower, lower.

It was gone.

I stopped drinking. ‘She’s finished,’ I said.

But then suddenly my sisters were shouting! No, no! It’s not all gone! You just can’t see it!

Water. It’s almost invisible.

I looked again, and the bottle caught the light. My sisters were right! There was still water there!

I started again—I put everything into it. I drew on reserves of strength I never knew I had. Nothing mattered now. I was nothing. I was this baby bottle of apple juice. And it was almost all gone! There were just a few drops left — I could see the end —

And then, suddenly, it was over.

The girl with the water had finished. Her bottle was empty. Her supporters were cheering.
I looked at my bottle.
At least, I thought, I’ve come second.
But the older woman — she had hardly any orange juice left! And she’d taken so many breaks! She’d been so relaxed about it!

I returned to my sisters. They were already talking about other things. Somebody was saying that head lice cannot jump or fly but they can trapeze.

I felt light-headed, faint almost.
I couldn’t figure out what had just happened.
A little while later, I was given a scented candle, for being a competitor. I felt a lot better after that.

Most of my sisters had lost their blue necklaces by now, but my youngest sister, Nicola, had collected five or six. I still had my own. I looked around the room. A few people had three or four necklaces. Nicola was coming first.
I said, ‘You should win mine from me.’
She looked confused for a moment — I kept my gaze fixed on her - and then she understood.
She pointed to a baby. ‘What’s that?’ she said.
‘A baby,’ I said. And I gave her my necklace.

She won the competition. At the end of the party, she had the most necklaces, and she won. She got a small ceramic turtle, for her bathtub.

15. Tings

2010-05-15T09:51:00.004+10:00

Walking up the stairs to go to bed, Charlie said, urgently, ‘Where are my tings?’

I didn’t realise he had trouble with the ‘th’ sound. Cute. It’s cute the way he gets things wrong.

But you have to try to correct him. It's your job.

‘What things?’ I said, and he said, ‘My tings. I left them downstairs.’

He ran back downstairs and returned with two plastic bottle lids, one orange, one blue.

‘These are my tings,’ he explained. He let me hold the orange one.

With a ting, what you have to do is, you press it against your chest. It’s hard to get the position right. It’s not just anywhere on your chest, it’s quite high, just below your throat I think, although I could have that wrong. Charlie’s the person to talk to about that. It’s safest to check with him, actually, each time you use your ting, because getting the position right is kind of the essence of the ting.

Anyhow, so you press your ting against your chest and then you wait a moment. That’s it, really. You just hold it there, wait, and then you put it down. That’s your ting.

14. On Finding Cassie Crazy/ The Year of Secret Assignments

2010-05-14T10:41:00.004+10:00

With this book, I thought: why not have three girls at Ashbury writing letters to three boys at Brookfield? And see what happens?

But what would happen. I didn’t know. So, one night, I lay down on the rug on the living room floor, closed my eyes, and listened to Black Market Music by Placebo.

Placebo, on high volume, make me feel exactly the way I felt when I was sixteen. By the time the album finished that night I had the characters and the plot.

I like both titles. The book started out as Lydia’s Notebook, and then I had to liven that up. I had long lists of ideas, a lot of them to do with paper cuts and paper tigers. The American publishers were not keen on Finding Cassie Crazy because they thought it might sound like somebody searching for a girl named Cassie Crazy. That’s why it became The Year of Secret Assignments in North America.

I was living in Birchgrove, in Sydney, in the ground floor apartment of a building right on the harbour. When a ferry arrived at the wharf, the whole apartment rattled and vibrated. I was working as a lawyer at the time. On weekends, we had pancakes down by the water, and fairy penguins sometimes swam right by us. I wrote on my laptop outside with an umbrella shielding the screen from the sun.

We had cockroaches, water rats, mice, lizards and termites in the apartment. That floor I was lying on, listening to Placebo, the termites were secretly eating it. Eventually, we started falling through the floorboards.

One night, before the floors and the window ledges crumbled, I woke up and there was a boot on the bed. What’s a boot doing on the bed? I thought, and I reached out to pick it up. My hand disappeared into some warm, deep darkness, and the boot shrieked, and leapt off the bed, and turned into a cat, a neighbour’s cat, flying across the room and out through the kitchen window.

I always felt bad about that cat. How peaceful he must have felt that night, curled up between us, deeply asleep. I’m allergic to cats, and later I remembered I’d been hayfeverish the last few weeks. The cat must have thought that the three of us were friends – that we had a silent, secret understanding – that, each night, when the moon was high over the water, he would slip into our room, and we would all sleep quietly until dawn.

And then, one night, out of the blue, the girl was suddenly poking it and screaming!, as you would scream too, if you woke to find a warm, yowling boot on your bed. But still. Poor cat.

13. On Feeling Sorry for Celia

2010-05-13T15:24:00.007+10:00

Last night I dreamed that a friend said to me: ‘Do you realise there’s a spotlight shining straight into your bedroom? We can see you from way across the river here!’
I was so embarrassed. But then I remembered I’d only been reading The Moorchild last night – a quality children’s book with a Newbery Honor sticker on the front – and wearing my best blue pyjamas, not the ones that fall off my shoulders. So, at least that was something.

Chill in the air today, but warm in the sun. At the Avenue Road Café, two English women sat down at the table beside me. They were dressed in parkas and scarves, and one said, ‘Back home, we’d be wearing t-shirts on a day like this,’ and they looked at one another and laughed. They laughed a lot, those two, in sudden, loud bursts, about small things. They were good company.

I wrote Feeling Sorry for Celia when I was living in Cambridge, England. I lived there for three years, working on a PhD, and I remember walking home one day, and thinking: what is this, what is this strange feeling? Then I realised it was happiness. Not that I’d never been happy before — I had a very cheerful childhood — but I couldn’t remember ever feeling such sustained, persistent happiness.

Feeling Sorry for Celia is a book about two girls who make friends through a letter-writing exchange — one goes to an exclusive, private school called Ashbury; the other to a poor, rough school. The main character, Elizabeth, also gets letters from imaginary organisations such as The Association of Teenagers.

When I was in high school, a friend of mine transferred to another school. Even though we still lived nearby, we decided to write letters to each other. She wrote hilarious letters. And she wanted to be an artist, so she decorated the envelopes, and sent me little paintings. So, that was the inspiration for the letter-writing in the book.

Also, when I was in high school, there was a voice in my head all the time that said things like, ‘Well, don’t you look gorgeous today,’ and ‘Huh, that was very clever, what you said to that boy, he is definitely going to ask you out’. Only the voice was being sarcastic.

At first, I was going to just refer to the fact that Elizabeth had this jeering, sneering voice in her head. But what was funny about that. Nothing. So I took the voice out of her head and distributed it amongst various clubs and societies. To lighten the mood.

Two things I just now realised: the letters I got from my friend when I was in high school — they were the exact opposite of the voice in my head. Also, when I was living in Cambridge — in an attic room with sloping ceilings, an owl in the tree outside my window, cycling through streets with shopping bags tied to the handlebars, writing a novel at night in the computer room while undergraduates played computer games around me (‘I’ve got the gold key’, ‘I’ve got the silver key!’ ‘I will eviscerate you!’) – the voice was just about gone.

12. Rainbow

2010-05-12T21:13:00.004+10:00

My prism made a rainbow on the bookshelf today; it just needed the morning sun.

Hang on, the computer is upset.
It can’t communicate with the scanner.
Yeah, that’s my fault. I unplugged it accidentally for a moment.
Just — just try not to let it bother you so much.

Anyway, I have to talk about a day a few months back. It went like this.
We were walking down the road to meet a friend for coffee.
It was a pale, rainy day, and the harbour was ice-blue. In the distance, against pale clouds, the shimmer of a rainbow.
‘Look,’ I said to Charlie. ‘There’s a rainbow.’
I thought: he’s never seen one; where have all the rainbows gone; I guess, no rain, no rainbows.
‘Can you see it?’ I said, pointing, and he nodded, but I didn’t believe him. It was so faint and hesitant, and so far away.
‘They don’t make rainbows like they used to,’ I said.
Charlie was silent.

After coffee, the rainbow was gone. ‘It’s gone,’ I told Charlie, and again he was silent.

We walked past a construction site— diggers, dump trucks, crane— and stopped to watch a while.
‘Maybe they’re building a new rainbow,’ Charlie suggested. I got the impression he was trying to cheer me up.

Almost home, and a rainbow lorikeet was strung up dead on the electrical wires. A crow was pecking at it, feathers raining down on us.

Charlie asked what it was, and I couldn’t think of anything to say except that’s a dead bird. He did not seem to mind. I didn’t mention the crow, and neither did he. I tried not to think about it.

Inside, I went to put some music on. Radiohead’s In Rainbows was lying there beside the stereo.

That’s a lot of rainbows, I thought, in just one day.

*

I’m trying to scan in some photos at the moment.
In the next few days I want to write, on this blog, about the places where I was when I wrote each of the Ashbury books.
Why not.
But turns out my photos of those places are not the way that I remember them. I thought they were beautiful! But no. Just grainy snapshots at odd angles, and too dark. And that’s setting aside the fact that the computer and the scanner aren’t speaking.

*

A few weeks after that day, we saw a real rainbow.

It was a summer evening. I stopped at a gap between houses and trees to point out the rainbow to Charlie. He was sitting in his pram. This time there was no question: the rainbow was right there beside us, and not pretty, pale pastels but deep, bold colours. Something comical about that rainbow, some edge to it, some joke.

It was dusk. The sky was alive with the threat of a rainstorm. The clouds that day! They had a wild, purple extravagance. This is where the word ‘ominous’ belongs, I thought - it’s a word that should be stored for clouds like those! I actually began to feel afraid. I started to run. I ran the pram all the way down the hill — and Charlie was happy, holding his feet straight out — the wind and the speed.

Two sulphur-crested cockatoos were swooping down the hill at the same time. The swoop of them against that dark, dark sky – the immediacy of it – what’s going to happen?

Charlie says that often — he sings it actually— what’s going to happen?

The white of those birds against the dusk storm light – the shining, shining white of their swooping — and the curve of that wry and witty rainbow in the gaps between the houses and the paperbark trees.

11. Listen, tomorrow I'm going to write about a dead bird on a wire, but today I just wanted to say this.

2010-05-11T20:51:00.006+10:00

Well, it’s all great and there are days that start with a knock on the door, and it’s the glass prism I ordered, along with the glow-in-the-dark stars. I plan to make rainbows with this prism, and put stars all over my child’s walls, and this, it has always seemed to me, is exactly what it is to be a parent.

An autumn theme at his music class — they had to be trees, and fluttering leaves, also falling leaves, and stamping through leaves, and throwing leaves in the air — the children restless as leaves themselves, flying across the room to their mothers, or all of them suddenly thirsty at once, or wandering across to the jingle sticks and tone boxes, the teacher patiently sweeping them back into the circle.

Back home, the prism won’t make rainbows, only a pointless square of white. He keeps asking why I’m putting those stars on his walls. Cherry tomatoes spill onto the floor, and when I turn around he has stamped on each for the pleasure of the splat. Baking a cake for a visitor, and now there’s cocoa and cracked egg on the couch. The mixture’s done, just one thing left, ‘We need to add some water,’ I say, turning back with a quarter of a cup. But the two litre jug of drinking water was right there at his fingertips - and he’s pointing to the mix with quiet pride.

I baked the cake anyway. The visitor ate a piece. She said, 'It's all right. It's fine!' which was not what I had planned for her to say.

He’s supposed to be asleep now but he’s calling out, ‘I’m just eating my foot, okay?’ and ‘Can you take these stars off my walls?’

10. If you find yourself heading down a very steep hill, you've gone too far

2010-05-10T15:22:00.008+10:00

Walking up the road to get cinnamon and buttermilk to bake a cake, when the phone rang.

It was going to be Divine Ginger Cake with Caramel Icing. The recipe was in the lift-out book my mother had found in her Women’s Weekly magazine. ‘Make that for me one day,’ she said, pointing to the picture of Divine Ginger Cake when she gave me the recipe book.

So I was going to make it, but walking up the road to the shops, my phone rang and it was my mother. ‘The picnic time has changed,’ she said, ‘now it’s at 11.30.’ I looked at my watch, and it was 11.15. So no cake.

My sisters and their husbands and small children, and my brother and his pregnant wife, all around a table for our Mothers' Day picnic yesterday. Fenced-in playground on the left, tennis courts to the right, soccer fields all around us.

‘It’s the park where you used to play tennis,’ Mum told me on the phone, ‘with that boyfriend you had, years and years go,’ and she said his name.

‘It’ll come back to you,’ she said, ‘as you drive,’ and she gave me directions, in the vivid way she has, second right into Cook Street, cook like the chef, and you’ll pass a school and a post office, the leaves are changing colours there, and the park’s on Park, which is appropriate, isn’t it, she said.

He was a good tennis player, that boyfriend from years and years ago, with a swift, sharp serve. We played at night, the lights too dim, tennis balls lost in shadows.

‘If you start to head down a very steep hill,’ said Mum, ‘you’ve gone too far.’

I turned off just before the very steep hill and found the park, the tennis courts, football fields, family, children playing in the playground.

He’s a facebook friend now, that boyfriend, but we’ve never caught up. I mean, there has never been any: ‘How the heck are ya, whatcha been up to these last twenty years anyhow?’ I think it has been twenty years. Yes. It has.

He sent me a friend request, is all, and I said okay. Then I looked at his page. He’d been involved in a recent food fight with one friend, and exchanged a flurry of kisses with another, but otherwise nothing much was happening there. No photos, no details, no status updates. I checked a few more times but all was quiet. The remains of the food fight congealing on his wall.

It was a good day, the picnic day, sun warm, shade cold. A song, though — Kokomo, by the Beach Boys — it kept humming in my head, which was distressing.

We never had anything in common, that boyfriend and I. My sense of direction – the fact that I get lost so much – it bothered him enormously. But he taped his Bryan Ferry album for me, and wrote out the song titles in red ink. For ‘Slave to Love’ he put a heart shape instead of the ‘o’ in Love. Also, he sometimes gave me bars of Lindt chocolate.

At one point during the mothers’ day picnic, Charlie came and took my hand and said, ‘I need you, Mummy,’ and took me directly to a flight of steps. ‘I need to go up those steps,’ he said. The stairs took us to the roof of the toilet block, and we stood up there for a few moments, watching a game of soccer from above.

‘Some kids were throwing rocks at me,’ he said, eventually, and he pointed out the kids.

So we walked back down and two small boys were kicking a ball around. Those kids, I said, were throwing rocks at you?

The boys admitted it at once. They said they had to throw rocks because they didn’t want him to play soccer with them.

I spoke to them quite firmly and said you must never, never, never throw rocks. Also, I said, you be nice to people, please.

Charlie seemed cheerful and we went back to the picnic and the playground.

A sister took Charlie aside for a moment, and then he approched me with a white paper bag, ribbons tied around its handle, and a pink card covered in owls. Whoooo has the most Special Mum? said the card, and inside my sister had traced around Charlie’s little hand with blue ink. In the paper bag, was the latest Lorrie Moore novel. I didn’t even know Lorrie Moore had a new book out! It’s hard to explain how happy I was with the whole thing.

Some time later, a few of the sisters said, Hey, what are those boys doing to Charlie? and I looked through the playground fence, and it was the rock-throwing boys. One of them was picking up a stick, and somebody said, ‘That one just called Charlie stupid!’ I got there fast. The boy dropped the stick. I started talking—stridently, or maybe more than stridently —‘You do not speak to people that way! You do not call people stupid! He is certainly not stupid! You be nice to people, please!’

I went on at this child quite a bit.

I wondered if I’d gone too far, and then my five-year-old nephew said to me, surprised, ‘Is that boy one of your childs?’ So maybe I had. But actually, I didn't care.

Charlie seemed quite happy now, and he held onto my hand and said, ‘I’m not stupid, am I?’

We drove home and I was singing that song, Kokomo, to myself, and thinking, shhhh, stop it, why do you keep singing that, and then I remembered that boyfriend from years and years ago – when he first asked me out I was working in a toyshop for the summer, and he came into the shop on a hot day, and I was sitting on the carpet, unpacking toys, and he asked me out on a date, and Kokomo was playing on the shopping centre audio system. Funny, the things that come back to you as you drive.

9. Walking home through a cold, dark night

2010-05-09T21:30:00.004+10:00

Walking home through a cold, dark night, Charlie said, ‘What’s a man with a light on his hat?’
‘A miner?’ I said. ‘Do you mean a miner?’
‘What’s a miner?’ he said.
Someone who goes down a mine, I said.

A mine, I said, is a kind of big hole, like a tunnel underground, where people go to get things, like gold, or coal, or emeralds, or silver, or oil, or -

Thinking, oh, no, I’m going to have to define all those terms. And should I be raising issues like working conditions in diamond mines; the historical implications of the closure of mines in coal mining towns; and at what point do I gently let him know that it doesn’t necessarily have to be a man – the man with the light on his hat – miners can be women, too.

‘Oh, yeah, I know mines,’ Charlie said, nodding to himself, ‘a mine is where you go to find things when you’ve lost them.’

We rounded the corner, a steep corner of the path, and, ‘Look,’ said Charlie, ‘see, there he goes again,’ pointing at a cyclist riding by, safety light flashing on his helmet, a man with a light on his hat.

8. The Wiring

2010-05-08T09:17:00.006+10:00

Strange day yesterday. The babysitter blew a fuse, I mean that literally. It wasn’t her fault, it is the wiring. So I had to come back earlier than usual, from Maisys, the café up the road, and stand on the chair with the broom, to reach the fuse box.

It was good to have an excuse to leave Maisys anyway. The bearded man had sat down beside me, opened his laptop, and told me he'd predicted Thursday’s stock market crash. 'Do you believe in synchronicity?' he said, as his opening line. Then he told me he'd predicted the crash. He showed me an article he'd posted on his website, just the other day, predicting it. I read his article but I couldn't make head nor tails of it. 'Where's the bit where you predict the stock market falling?' I said, when I'd finished reading. And he pointed to a line that said, 'Remember the crash of 87?'

I had my paper and pens right there on the table; I opened my Isaac Newton book and began to take notes, sensing all the time the bearded man watching me. 'See?' he said, 'this is another one.' And I had to read another of his articles. He talks about put and call options in his articles. I had the uneasy feeling that he might be a genius; that if I just stopped reading about Isaac for a moment, the bearded man could explain the universe to me, in addition to making me a fortune. He has a bracing style. 'I like your style,' I said, 'but I can't understand a word.'

Then I had to go home to the fuse box.

7. Difficult Whys

2010-05-07T18:42:00.007+10:00

We are standing on the beach.
'What time is it?’ asks Charlie.
I check my watch. ‘It’s three thirty.’
‘Why?’

*

Not long ago, I heard about a novel that was written all in questions. I thought, why? Why can’t I write a novel all in questions? Why can I not write sideways or through tunnels?

I decided to write a novel quickly. I’d write it in two minutes. I felt excited. If this took off! The two-minute novel! I’d write hundreds of them. Maybe thousands.

I would let it write itself. That novel all in questions surely wrote itself, questioned itself into existence. You never need the answers if you only write in questions, and the same must be true if you write quickly.

So I wrote this novel while I brushed my teeth. Here it is:

If I had a peach there would be two of us.
I’m a man in my forties. I'm hanging white sheets on my cobwebbed clothesline, the pegs snapping from rust, and men, I’m thinking, have too much time to think. That’s their trouble.
What will happen next in this novel is, I’ll turn out to be arrogant, at large, a criminal. I’ll be a little mad. I'll lean into the wind. And I’ll have many interests, for the metaphors.
I’ll be somewhat effete, selfish, self-satisfied, complaining, somebody who likes to eat food, but ultimately, I’ll be likeable.
Sometimes I’ll surprise you with restraint and/or dignity. I’ll speak about men, and their trouble, with conviction. Sometimes I’ll speak about my author, too, about Jaclyn — or Jaci if I’m in a casual mood — and I’ll speak of her with tenderness when I do. I’ll speak of her in a soft, soft voice, for she is bruised, at the moment, bruised as an apple that has fallen from a shopping bag and tumbled helter-skelter down the street.
I suspect I couldn't sail, even if I tried — but if I had a peach there would be two of us. Me, and the peach.
(ends)

*

Years ago, I wrote a short story and I told a friend that I’d written a short story but it’s bad, I said, it’s terrible.
That’s good, he said. Which surprised me.
It’s out now, he explained. It was in your mind there, clogging up your mind, so now that it’s out, you can write a masterpiece.
Thanks, I said.

*

We are walking up the hill in the dark. Charlie is wearing his green jacket. It’s a simple green jacket with a hood, and the number 8 on the front.

‘And one day I’ll go to a party,’ he is saying, ‘and I’ll wear this jacket, won't I?!’
‘Yep!’
‘And I’ll put the hood on and everyone will think that I’m a giant squid, won't they?!’
‘They sure will!’
‘Why?’

6. Imagine

2010-05-06T14:07:00.008+10:00

Imagine if this were my garden.

Actually, it is my garden.

Now imagine Charlie and me having a picnic here, maybe filling up the paddling pool, or playing a spaceship game.

And all the time the dog next door is growling.

Every time we go into the garden, the dog next door is there - right at the fence - and the growling starts low then it rises and rises into a fierce, frantic bark, then descends again into a low, ferocious growl that goes on and on, and sometimes the anger gets too much for the dog and he throws himself against the fence.

We glance at each other, Charlie and I, when that happens — the loud thud — then we turn back to our game.

Sometimes we call out. ‘It’s okay! We live here! You remember us?’ But that only makes it worse. So mostly we pretend nothing’s happening. We offer one another imaginary cups of tea, and we repair space ships, or water the garden, and the growling and the thudding go on.

Now and then we look up at the fence. The state of the fence.

5. It was my first nut

2010-05-05T13:25:00.004+10:00

There's something about a three-year-old reaching into the pockets of his jeans.

Charlie has been carrying a gumnut around for the last few days. Last night, he reached both hands into his pockets, and they came out empty, his face surprised.
‘Is it gone?’ I said.
He nodded.
Then he looked thoughtful. ‘It was my first nut,’ he said. ‘And I loved it.’

I searched the house for it, and found it in the couch cushions. He seemed mildly pleased to see it again, but handed it back to me almost at once, and went on playing with the racing cars.

4. At the Avenue Road Cafe

2010-05-04T17:44:00.004+10:00

I go to the Avenue Road Café once a week, and write notes and ideas using coloured markers. For my new series, about the Kingdom of Cello, I am using many different colours, and I’m reading a book on Isaac Newton. I have fresh mint tea, at the Avenue Road Café, and orange-apple-and-pineapple juice, and pain au chocolat. The pastry is warm and the chocolate melts across the plate when I tear it in half.

Once, last year, at the Avenue Road Café, the waitress came to my table, looking stricken, and pale, and said that they had burnt my pain au chocolat. It was the last one, she said. She knew how important it was to me. She was sad and apologetic, and suggested a few other treats. I chose some kind of apple tart, but this was when I was working on the ending of Dreaming of Amelia/Ghosts of Ashbury High, and, in my heart, I knew I could not plot those final pages without melting chocolate.

Then the waitress came back and said that James had an idea. Would I mind trying this idea? James is the manager of the Avenue Road Café. And James’s idea was to take a plain croissant, and fill it with Belgian chocolate, and warm it in the oven. Would I mind, she pleaded, just trying it to see how it goes?

Ah, so funny that she thought she had to plead with me.
I plotted those final pages in an exquisite, melting chocolate trance, and it is for this reason that I acknowledge the Avenue Road Café, and thank them for the chocolate, in Dreaming of Amelia/The Ghosts of Ashbury High, and it is for this reason that, ever since, I have been deeply in love with that James. He calls all his customers ‘darling’, not just me, but never mind.

*

Yesterday, I was sitting at an outside table at the Avenue Road Café. At the table on my right were two older women, elegantly dressed. One of these women was talking energetically into her mobile phone. Her friend sat opposite and gazed around.

On my left, a mother sat with a little boy, and a baby in a pram. The little boy noticed my coloured markers, so I gave him a handful and some blank pieces of paper.

I read about Isaac, and wrote notes in different colours. The elegant woman on my right continued her animated phone conversation. ‘What?’ she cried, ‘does he think I should make a play for him? Him and his steel wool hair! A fine thing that would be, wouldn’t it?’

The young mother and her little boy drew pictures together, and wrote numbers, and letters of the alphabet. After a while, they returned the markers to me, and both mother and child thanked me effusively, and they left.

‘Anyway,’ said the woman on my right, into her phone, ‘the food’s here now so I’ll let you go.’ I looked quickly across at her companion, but her face was blank. The woman started up a similarly animated conversation with her patient friend.

Then it was time for me to go. ‘You wish to pay your bill?’ said the waiter, with a flourish. ‘It has already been taken care of ..’ and he pointed to the table where the mother had drawn pictures with her child.

‘Oh, no!’ I said. It was too much! She had paid my bill! All I had done was hand over a few coloured markers! And I’d got them back! It was nothing!

There was a sudden silence at the table on my right. ‘Well,’ said the animated woman, ‘isn’t that nice?’ She sounded complicated, almost hostile.

Actually, it was nice. It was lovely. What a thing. I decided just to be glad, and keep an eye out for the woman, to say thanks.

Good things happen at the Avenue Road Café.

3. Martin

2010-05-03T16:08:00.003+10:00

I like people with gaps between their front teeth. I always wished I had one. Strange, it never occurred to me that Carolyn might not have been so keen on her gap. So that dedicating a book to ‘the girl with the gap’ might actually have been kind of cruel.

She was always making fun of the braces on my teeth. Maybe she was jealous? Maybe she wanted to deflect attention from her own troubled teeth? Also, she might have been frightened all the time—living on the edge—knowing that there must come a moment when I realised that I had the perfect comeback. I never did though.

It’s like that boy, Martin, in fourth grade, who used to think my name was funny. Moriarty. It’s so close Mori-farty! He was always laughing and calling out, ‘Hi there, Jaci Mori-farty’. I could never think of a response. I just gave him withering looks. And his name was Martin.

*

The good people at Café Zo Zo added Charlie’s medicine to his strawberry milkshake for me. He drank the whole thing without a clue.

Funny, the things you can get away with when it’s a kid.
Imagine if you went to a café with a friend, and asked the waiter — in an urgent, surreptitious whisper — if this dropper full of gluggy, white liquid could be slipped into your friend’s cappuccino, please.

2. Madagascar

2010-05-02T10:32:00.004+10:00

Last night, my friend barbecued under starlight. In the last two weeks, she said, she has watched all fourteen available episodes of Glee, and then watched them again. 'I keep wanting to try that show,' I said. 'It might be partly the singing,' she said. Because she’s a professional singer herself, and teaches voice to high school students.

I slipped Charlie’s medicine into a cup of cranberry juice. He started drinking it. I was talking, but the corner of my heart was singing because he was drinking it. Then he knocked the cup over.

After dinner, Charlie and my friend’s little girl sat at the table watching Madagascar on a laptop computer, and eating chocolate cake with teaspoons. My friend and I sat on the couch and she showed me the first episode of Glee.

Walking home through the almost full moonlight, I had the mad happiness of a perfect barbecue, red wine, chocolate, and a new tv show that I already loved, deeply loved, all those episodes stretched before me.
I looked it up on Amazon as soon as I got home, so I could order it.

*

Just before I fell asleep, I remembered the day when a window fell on my hand. I was thirteen, and it was afternoon rollcall. Something snapped in the window and it came hurtling down onto my hand. Nobody saw. I turned around expecting a shocked hush then a rush of exclamations, but nobody saw except Carolyn. I looked at her. She looked back at me. Carolyn had a wide gap between her two front teeth, and it was her job to be mean to me. For the whole year, she’d been mean to me. She was always referring to the braces on my teeth, and narrowing her eyes at my hair.
But this day, she moved towards me and said, ‘Are you okay?’

I was so moved by this. I decided I would dedicate a book to her one day. To the girl with the gap between her two front teeth, because she asked if I was okay. I thought that would be more poetic than just To Carolyn.

I don’t think I will though. Dedicate a book to her. It’s good that she chose not to scowl or call me Braceface at that moment, but actually, when a window crash lands onto somebody’s hand, it’s just common courtesy to ask if they’re okay.

*

I fell asleep and dreamed that I accidentally joined a Canadian political party. I had to participate in a debate. My team mate was going to do a humorous skit, where he hooked a pair of sunglasses over the front of his shirt, and then said, ‘Wait a minute! I thought this was a tie!’ It was going to be pretty funny. But I had to do a speech. ‘I want to tell you something,’ I said into the microphone. ‘Once – once, I read some legislation, and I did not understand it.’ I paused for dramatic effect. ‘But then an expert explained it to me … and I did.’ There was breathless silence in the stadium. ‘And that is why you should vote for me.’

I sat down again, without another word. There were gasps around me. Two men in oversized, crumpled suits gave me the thumbs-up signal.

1. Hiding in Chocolate Milk

2010-05-01T09:56:00.002+10:00

‘Which ear is it?’
It’s this one, I say, and Charlie shakes his head, points to the other.
‘Shall I look?’ says the doctor, with her tiny light, and, ‘You’re both right,’ she says. ‘It’s in both.’

The crying tumbled through the night. I brought him into my bed and the night tumbled on, picture books by night light, Panadol in a little plastic cup. In this story the bears are making mud pies. Quiet crying, crying then quiet, under the blankets, blaming the blankets, pushing them all to the floor. I’m making up the words to lullabies. Hush little baby, please don’t cry, Mummy’s gonna bake you an apple pie. In this story a rabbit gets new ice skates for her birthday. And if that apple pie’s too hot, Mummy’s gonna smoke a whole bunch of pot. The crying’s growing stronger. He is taking the pillow from under my head, he is climbing all over the bed, looking for the place it doesn’t hurt.

Once I fell asleep and woke to find him curled on top of my head, elbow on my eye, pressing his ear into my hair.

‘Do you like lolly snakes?’ says the doctor. She puts the jar of snakes onto her desk. ‘These are such big snakes’ she says. ‘I'll have to see if one will fit into your mouth,’ wooden stick on his tongue, light down his throat, ‘it will!’
‘I will eat the snake when we get out of here,’ he whispers to me. ‘Okay,’ I whisper back.

Carry him out to pay the bill, he takes a bite of the lolly snake, and throws up onto the carpet. A pregnant woman waiting is quiet.

At home, I pile them all into the machine, his clothes and my clothes, then remember that the washing machine’s still broken.

First we have to get you better, I say. Give him the medicine and he spits it back out, white splatters on his clean t-shirt and the floor.

I call the washing machine repairman and he still doesn’t answer, so I leave a message saying there’s vomit all over our clothes.
I call the other repairman. The other repairman is the father of the first one. He tells me his son was in an accident. That’s why he didn’t show up the other day.
That’s why he’s not answering my calls.
Is he all right? I try to say.
He was following his friend, says the father. He had his mobile phone, see, he was looking at his mobile phone, and he crashed into the back of his friend’s car. His car was written off.
Was he all right? I say again.
He was all right. He was fine. He will get a new car this weekend. Then he will come to you. Maybe next Wednesday or Thursday.

I try being firm. You have to take your medicine. I sit him on my lap, show him the dropper. Your ears are both sick and the doctor says that this will make them better, open your mouth for me. He gags, spits it out, writhes out of my arms. A small pot of fingerpaint hits the side of my head. ‘I have to throw things at you,’ he explains, ‘because you are trying to make me have that medicine.’

What’s the guy been doing? Sitting looking at his broken car?
He should have called me back, I tell his father.

I sit on the steps beside Charlie and tell him a story. There’s little monsters in your ears, and that medicine, you know your medicine, it’s full of tiny little police and when you swallow the medicine the police go racing straight up to your ears and attack the monsters! Charlie’s face lights up.
We go to get the medicine. He sees the spots of white on the outside of the dropper and backs away. He’s hiding behind the couch and sobbing. ‘I want the monsters to stay in my ears, leave them alone.’

My sister drops by. She runs to the store and brings back chocolate milk. You hide the medicine in the chocolate milk, she says.
See? she says to Charlie. Here’s a special treat for you.
Charlie tells my sister that he loves her. He takes a mouthful of the chocolate milk. Everything is beautiful, like sleep.

The repairman’s father knocks on the door. He says he’ll fix the machine. He heads into the laundry. A few minutes later he comes back out and shows me a magazine. ‘It was jammed underneath,’ he says, ‘caught in the motor.’
He charges me $65.
‘I don’t like this chocolate milk,’ says Charlie.

First day of May today. I’m going to blog every day in May. The other ones are going to be shorter than this.

It’s a day of festivals, flowers, anarchy, bonfires, and young people jumping from bridges into 2 feet of water. May Day. I just looked it up. That’s how I know the details. The eight hour day. Here, it's the start of winter - I just turned on the fire, there’s a new chill in the air - but on May Day, everybody parties, the end of winter, releasing the balloons.

A few weeks back, I drove home from a party through the rain with a blue balloon.
The balloon pressed its head against the ceiling. Then it leaned sideways so all I could see in the rear view mirror was blue.
Outside the car at home, Charlie reached for the balloon.
‘I’ll bring it inside,’ I said.
‘Give me the balloon,’ he said.
‘No, no.’ I was holding it tight, ‘I’ll carry it inside for you - or tie it to your wrist’, and he breathed in, calmly, ‘Just give it to me.’
We were standing on the footpath in the rain beside the open car door. I started talking. I said, ‘If you let go of the ribbon, this balloon will fly away,’ and he said, ‘Give it to me.’
I said: ‘Do you want—are you sure— Because you know that this will fly away? If it slips out of your fingers, even for a second, it will go up into the sky. And it will keep on going up, and you will never get it back. Do you understand?’
He reached out his hand for the balloon.

That’s where I’ll leave it for now.
Charlie sitting on the couch, medicine hidden in a mug of chocolate milk. The mug is blue. It stands on the coffee table. ‘I don’t like this chocolate milk,’ he says again. Charlie and I on the footpath in the rain outside our house. Bright blue balloon between us like a maypole, waiting to see what we will do.

Strange

2010-04-26T16:30:00.003+10:00

What was I thinking, am I mad? To say I would blog every day for a month! Isn’t it the strangest thing—that after I wrote a guest post for Justine, about how I cannot blog every day—I came straight back here and, as if in a trance, promised I would blog every day.
As if that was the right thing to do, to celebrate ten years since my first novel.
Forgetting all about champagne.

Well, but I promised. So I will do it. In May. Every day in May. On account of the rhyme.

Meanwhile, my sister

2010-04-26T16:20:00.005+10:00

Meanwhile, my sister, Liane Moriarty, now has a website, and a blog. She's already written three posts on her blog, wham, wham, wham, she just steps up and writes, all of it funny.

Liane's most recent books have w's in them. What Alice Forgot, and a children's book, the Wicked War on the Planet of Whimsy. Both books are wonderful and wise; whirlwinds of wonder.

Another thing. The letter of the day on Sesame Street today was w. I'm not kidding.

(The number of the day was 11.)

Guest Post

2010-04-26T16:12:00.006+10:00

Justine Larbalestier is an excellent writer with an excellent blog. The other week she very kindly asked me to write a guest post for her, and here it is.

Ten Years

2010-04-15T16:01:00.006+10:00

On the first of May, it will be exactly ten years since my first novel, Feeling Sorry for Celia, was published.

Actually, ten years is not that long. Ten. It’s a cute little number. I remember when I turned ten. I was just a kid.

Anyhow, but ten years ago was the year 2000, and I was a lawyer in Sydney then. Everything was in good spirits that year. The ferry boats, the desk chairs, the dictaphones. All in a good mood. Boats bobbing, chairs spinning, dictaphones sitting on my desk with wry little smiles. Those down-turned smiles.

In 1999, I was drafting contracts to comply with the Year 2000 Disclosure Act. My name and number were listed on a pocket-size card headed Y2K Action Response Team.

But on New Year’s Eve, I stood on a Birchgrove rooftop watching fireworks, and nobody phoned for urgent legal advice.

I didn’t even have my phone switched on, to be honest.

And then it was the year 2000! And everything was cheerful. The contracts took a turn for the better. The Sydney Olympics were great! Everyone was worried but they turned out fine. The writer, Garth Nix, working as a literary agent at the time, sat opposite me in the café downstairs from my office—the one that closed down years ago, the one with the strange, inky spell—and told me with calm confidence, that he could get me publishers for Feeling Sorry for Celia. I didn’t believe him for a moment. I thought it was an elaborate hoax, like Y2K itself. But that’s what he did.

The year 2000, eh? That was years ago.

Ten years.

It’s a lifetime.

In celebration of the ten year anniversary, my Australian publishers are planning new editions of my books. The Ashbury books. I never set out to write a series about Ashbury High, but the books kept going back there. So now there are four.
In the UK and North America, beautiful new editions of the Ashbury books are already underway. I will show you the UK ones later, but here are some of the American covers, designed by the brilliant Elizabeth Parisi.

Ten years seems the right time to shift to a new series. This time I will do it on purpose. A five book series set partly in a Kingdom, and partly in the real world.

But I’ll tell you a secret. There’s something—a voice in my ear. There’s a great bird of prey just here on my shoulder, leaning in when I try to write. Its claws in my flesh, its voice in my ear—and you can’t start something new with a bird on your shoulder.

So I have a plan to get free of it. I’m going to write it away. Thirty blog posts in thirty days. Starting next week, I will write every day for a month. I plan to talk about the Ashbury books, and how I wrote them, and about a recent roadtrip to the Western Plains Zoo. And somehow, in the course of that, I’m going to let it go. Get free of it, that bird. Those talons, the voice, that weight.

Then I can start my new series— I want a character to walk out free and clear, I want him to be tossing a ball, a red ball, and his hat is woollen and dark grey, and he’s walking across snowy fields. Across white, white, white, white fields.

Poetry Competition

2010-03-30T17:29:00.004+11:00

To celebrate the launch of my new website, I held a poetry competition. Entrants were asked to write a haiku or short poem on the subject of fear or ghosts. Every entry was special. A fellow writer chose a shortlist for me and we worked together to choose the five winners. Finalists and special mentions are in the previous two posts; the five winners are below.

The judging panel chose the following poems on the basis that they expressed a coherent idea about ghosts or fear, with brevity, originality, and in a fresh and vivid style. The panel was especially drawn to the final surprising moments—provocative, chilling or humorous—in these five poems.

On Fear

I fear I'll dream beneath closed eyes
I fear my truths and worse my lies
I fear I'll always be alone
When I wake up and find you gone

Sometimes fears hide honesty
They show us things we cannot see
Yet often, too, they're insincere
What, then, the use of trusting fear?

(Tara, Barooga, New South Wales)

My unquiet heart thrums.
Death reaches my hands,
And I grasp, but he lets go.

(Carmen, Chirnside Park, Victoria)

Eyes thirsty,
searching, scanning...
slamming shut.
Hair standing on end,
hand grasping at head,
toes curling under,
and under,
and under again.
Heart torn in two,
in three, in seven,
in nine thousand and ten.
Finger jabbing
mouse clicking,
ex-ing, ex-ing,
ex-ing out again.
Windows shut,
screens clear,
tentative eyes
blink open,
stolen breaths return
to welcoming lungs.
Fear releases me
from the atrocity
of spoilers.

(Angelica of Burr Ridge, Illinois, USA)

Ghosts – wispy white wonders,
Wandering between one world and the next,
Watching over us? one must wonder—
Or imaginary wonders of what one wants.

(Kym, Eatons Hill, Queensland)

Ghosts:

Drums beat out a slow pace.
The marchers unseen,
Their feet pounded the ground
Beating a drum of their own.
The sound travelled far
Echoing through my skull
Calling me back from distant plains.
I came, but saw nothing.
My eyes were long gone.
The sound just a memory.
I screamed at the living
But they chose not to hear.
Alone and forgotten,
I lay back down
A blackness creeping over my heart.
Resting my head on an earthen pillow
I consigned my soul back into the darkness,
As ghosts walked over my grave.

(Christopher, originally from Malta, but now residing in Sheffield)

Poetry Competition 2: Finalists

2010-03-30T17:28:00.002+11:00

Thank you, especially, to those who sent in haikus. Here are two of my favourites:

As chill creeps across-
a faceless form disappears,
and silent cries fade…

(Grace, Evans Head in New South Wales)

A whisper, a brush
On my sleeve, memory of
things past, but still here

(Helen, Towson, Maryland, USA)

I was also drawn to the crisp brevity and clever twist of:

Ghost I am
Ghost I’ll be
When I look in the mirror
What will I See

(Andrea, Sellersville, PA, USA)

Jennie (Kenora, Ontario, Canada) captured a moment of ghostly fear in her poem, The Fear:

I close my eyes and try to see
This faceless thing
Isolated
With me
Its cold claws clutch
Ensnare my heart
Numb
Limbs like lead
I tremble
My head
Spinning
Whispers
Can’t think
Can’t move
Can’t see
Palms clench
Eyes open
My heart
Thuds
My breath
Catches
I Jump
Into darkness, I disappear
Thick
Unknown
The Fear above
Now stands alone

Erin (Phoenix, Arizona) wrote a wonderfully original poem about being haunted by movie stars:

I told her, Listen.
Their faces are haunting me.
And she, because she is like me,
said back, They are haunting me, too.
We exchanged ghost stories, then.
(If only they were real ghosts,
maybe our stomachs could stop hurting.)
She talked about turning on the telly
and the shock of his grin
I said I went to the movies
where there was this enormous poster
with Angelina Jolie's name and eyes
next to the one about bones that are lovely
but when I turned around
(I swear I almost jumped)
he looked at me and I wanted
to say something back
but I couldn't, and so I left him standing there.
I've sworn off westerns, let's watch
a horror movie, or one about a planet of blue people,
only I'm not as strong as you,
so today I will search out those
I want to avoid.

If I was truthful--
If I was honest--
I would admit,
that's not really what I want.

Let the haunting continue.
It's all I can do.

And there were some vivid images of night terrors in this poem by Emma (Lane Cove, Sydney):

Shadows in the darkness of the night,
Wavering in corners
making shapes on walls
A heart clenching with fright.

Lurking beneath the surface
Ready to pounce
A killer, a monster,
Waiting
Watching
Their presence unannounced

A flicker of white,
A flash in sight
An eerie face
Waiting in place ..

Poetry Competition 3: Special Mentions

2010-03-30T17:25:00.003+11:00

Erin (Hove, South Australia) opened her poem with the vivid line: ‘I see Fear sitting in the corner over there’, and Pamela made me laugh with the lines:

My biggest fear was drawing near
How would my little baby appear?
Cute as a button or
Ugly as mutton??

I liked it when people wrote about unexpected fears - for example, Lesley opened her poem with, ‘This pain I fear will never go away’; Sylvie of Fresh Meadows, New York wrote a haiku about eighth grade insecurity; and Louisa of Kensington Park, South Australia wrote about our fear of being ourselves.

The judging panel agreed that any poem longer than a page could not be considered for the shortlist, since the contest had asked for a ‘haiku or short poem’ – but I want to thank all those who sent in long poems, and make special mention of two particularly powerful longer poems: one by Shauna (Duncraig, Western Australia); the other by Michelle (Ottawa, Canada).

Here are a couple of stanzas from Shauna’s haunting and intriguing poem:

The first time I saw the ghost was in my backyard.
She looked exactly the same.
Before I’d sent her away in the red car.
Watched her disappear down my street.
She hadn’t seen the tears slip down my face as she turned the
corner.
But now, it seemed, she was back. She watched me carefully from
the other side of the lawn. I blinked once, and she was gone.

…

The second time I saw the ghost was at the park.
She sat next to an old tennis ball.
Waiting expectantly.
Waiting for me.
I ran towards her. But the faster I ran, the further away she seemed.

And here is an extract from Michelle’s wickedly clever and moving,‘The Ghost in My Mirror’

…

About this ghost of mine:
He looks the same as the way I last saw him.
Auburn hair
Amber eyes
Five o’clock shadow along his jaw (though he haunts at all hours.)
He does not look at all waxy or transparent,
The way I suppose you might expect a ghost to look.
He’s wearing those sun-faded jeans, the price of which was our summer,
And the matching tan
And that’s all, I think.
I can never see beneath his knees.
(The mirror is an oval.)

Dreaming of Amelia

2009-11-04T16:04:00.007+11:00

My new book, Dreaming of Amelia, is now out in Australia and New Zealand. It will come out in the UK in April next year, and in the US and Canada in June (but there, it will be called The Ghosts of Ashbury High).

It's about two new characters, mysterious strangers named Amelia and Riley, who've just transferred to Ashbury. And it's a ghost story.

Another thing: I'm getting a website. It's almost ready. My brilliant brother-in-law named Steve is designing it.

I have other things to talk about. I keep overhearing conversations about robberies, for instance. There was a curious day with a rainbow theme. I saw the preview of a breathtaking new Australian horror film called Fragment. A journalist with a notepad and pen sat down beside me. 'I hope this is not too scary,' she whispered to her friend.

Today I took Charlie swimming at the North Sydney Pool. A woman was sitting on a brick wall outside with her head in her hands. The rain was soft on everything, the bridge and the curve of the Luna Park gate.

'Is that man coming home with us?' said Charlie, unexpectedly. I turned to see where he was pointing - a stranger in speedos, nice muscle tone, pleasant face, pushing his goggles up into his wet hair. 'I don't think he's coming home with us,' I said. We went to the swimming pool cafe then, and overheard two men discuss a robbery.

So, I will write about all these things one day soon, but for now, I'd better just post this, about the new book.

Melbourne

2009-09-03T19:36:00.004+10:00

Last night, I dreamed that I was on a flight to Melbourne and somebody phoned from the airline to tell me that my flight would be free. This meant I had to sit on a long, purple, comfortable couch.
I saw my friend Michael. He was coming to join me on the couch, because the same thing had just happened to him.
‘Isn’t it great?’ I said. ‘I’m just thinking of all the things I am going to do with the money now that I don’t have to use it for this ticket.’
But Michael said he wasn’t sure he liked it.
‘Yes,’ I said, thoughtfully, ‘I see what you mean. If we are not technically passengers, then are we really here?’
‘No,’ Michael said, ‘it’s more that I’m concerned that the airline will go under if it gives away too many free flights. And then how will we get home?’
At that moment, the pilot said we should prepare for descent. ‘We’d better let Melbourne know we’re coming,’ Michael said, and walked away.
So I dialled Melbourne. Somebody named Miranda answered.
‘Just letting you know that we’re about to land!’ I said.
There was a long, hostile silence from Miranda.
Eventually - uncertain - I hung up.

Boys on the Beach

2009-09-03T19:10:00.005+10:00

1.

2009-05-27T18:57:00.002+10:00

So I just glanced sideways and these words caught my eye:
the hours dissolve.
Somewhere in the junkmail on my bookshelf.
I panicked. I thought: YES. YOU ARE RIGHT. THE HOURS DO DISSOLVE. I MUST UPDATE MY BLOG!
And therefore, here I am.
It’s been so long!
I feel overwhelmed and shy. I feel like a cold day practising piano: everything stilted and uncertain.

2.

2009-05-27T18:56:00.004+10:00

Beside me on the desk is a bowl that once contained: a mandarin, an apple, and some chocolate. But now it’s just peels and a core.
It’s been so long, but I remember this: I’m always going on about the bowl of fruit and chocolate on my desk.

3.

2009-05-27T18:56:00.003+10:00

About that bowl of no-longer-fruit-and-chocolate on my desk.
There’s a used teabag in there. I didn’t mention that, did I, but yes. There it is.
It once made a fine cup of peppermint tea, but now it droops and sulks, the string stretched carelessly across the fruit remains.
Oh, apple core, so ravaged and forlorn!
Oh, sad and desperate tumble of mandarin peels! Still such a proud and vibrant orange!
But to what end, that proud and vibrant orange? Now that the mandarin is eaten?

4.

2009-05-27T18:55:00.004+10:00

Well, I seem to have warmed up.

5.

2009-05-27T18:55:00.003+10:00

The other day I wrote the words ‘the end’on my ghost story.
Sent it to my publishers.
I danced with Charlie to celebrate. After a while, he said, “Shall we stop dancing?”

6.

2009-05-27T18:54:00.007+10:00

He wanted to play dentist instead.
In his game of dentist, I have to sit on the couch and hold out my hands. He picks up a wooden spoon and very studiously sets to work running the spoon over each of my fingernails. He makes a low, droning sound as he does. Pausing in the drone between fingernails. Frowns with concentration, then gives me back my hands.
He’s never been to the dentist, Charlie.

7.

2009-05-27T18:54:00.006+10:00

Just got an e-mail from Air Canada. Turns out they’re having A World Wide Sale for Travel Into December.
Return flights, I hope. I wouldn’t mind a trip into December, just to see how things turn out. But then I’d want to come back here to May.

8.

2009-05-27T18:54:00.005+10:00

About my ghost story.
It’s another Ashbury book. There are two new characters, mysterious strangers named Amelia and Riley. It also features Lydia and Emily (from The Year of Secret Assignments/Finding Cassie Crazy), and Toby (from Bindy Mackenzie).
I’ve been working on this book for almost three years, and I’ll tell you a secret: all I want now is praise. One year of chocolate and praise.

9.

2009-05-27T18:52:00.005+10:00

The other day, Charlie and I made a carrot-pie-with-pecan-nut-crust.
“Let’s take a photo,” I said, and I put the pie on the table. “You stand behind it—okay, perfect—smile,” and he stood calmly, and I went click and look what he did.

10.

2009-05-27T18:51:00.005+10:00

About that teabag in the bowl of fruit peelings on my desk.
Its plump body, its long and sinuous tail—it puts me in mind of a blue bottle. A Portuguese Man-of-War.

11.

2009-05-27T18:51:00.004+10:00

The other night, Charlie pretended that the netted bag—the bag that holds the bath toys and hangs between the duck’s faces that are suctioned to the bathroom tiles—he pretended that this netted bag was a blue bottle.
He chased himself around the bath with it, shouting, “Be careful of the tail! The tail is going to sting you!”
Eventually, he believed himself. His shouts became panicked, and then he was sobbing, “Get me out of here! There’s a blue bottle! Get me out of here!”, reaching up with both arms, scrambling into the big, white towel.

12.

2009-05-27T18:50:00.004+10:00

To be honest, his imagination seems a bit fierce sometimes.
Baking muffins in the park, he said to his friend: “Be careful, they’re hot.”
She ignored him, reached for a muffin anyway, at which he grabbed at her hands, shrieked, fell to the ground, shouting in anguish: “THEY’RE HOT! PUT THEM DOWN! THEY’RE GOING TO BURN YOU!!’ .
“Charlie,” I said, “they’re not hot, you know. They’re just leaves and pieces of bark.”

13.

2009-05-27T18:50:00.003+10:00

The other day, I burned my finger on a pot of lemongrass tea.
I don’t like lemongrass tea, but I like its name. So I sometimes forget and order it.
Anyway, as I poured the lemongrass tea (sadly), this time pulling my sleeve over my hand so I could hold down the lid without burning my finger—as I did this, I remembered a windy day.

14.

2009-05-27T18:49:00.002+10:00

The windy day was a few months back.
We were in a park by the harbour.
A windswept family was hurrying along.
The father carried a little girl; the mother hoisted a stroller; the boy clutched a football underneath his arm.
They tumbled down a flight of steps.
“This way!” the father called. They half-jogged toward me along the path – panting, breathless—“This way!” he called again, more urgently – and they turned a sharp left, ran along the wharf, paused, and leapt aboard a yacht.
A white yacht.
I watched them through the windows of the yacht.
They sat down in four separate seats—their shoulders puffed for a while, then all four calmed and were still.
The yacht was tethered to the wharf.
The boy tossed his football gently up and down.
The father put his elbow on the side of the boat, and rested his chin on his hand.
The mother and the little girl gazed straight ahead.

Charlie and I played on the wharf. Paint and turpentine smells. A chill in the wind. Chinking and blustering. Bright whites and blues.
An hour passed. It was time to go home.
This is a true story: the yacht was still there, still tethered to the wharf.
The family still sat quietly in their seats.

15.

2009-05-27T18:48:00.011+10:00

About my ghost story.
The last months of writing felt so urgent and breathless, a panicked kind of tumbling, a rush to meet the deadline.
Then I wrote 'the end', and sent it to my editors.
And now what.
Just sitting quietly in a boat.

16.

2009-05-27T18:48:00.010+10:00

I suppose if I am going to carry on with the analogy, what will happen next is that the editors will turn up at the wharf, and start knocking on the side of my boat, gazing in the window, frowning at my family. They’ll be climbing aboard, tapping their nose, then suggesting that I take the football away from the boy and give it to the little girl. Give the boy a pair of rollerblades instead.
They’ll be calling to me: What about some dialogue in here? Some character development! An explanation for why they were running, and why they’re still sitting here an hour later! It makes no sense! What about some insight into how the boy feels (resentful? agitated?) about this day out with his family? Could the mother have a limp—a sprained ankle perhaps? And if so, how did she sprain it?
Also, does this have to be a yacht? What about a rowboat?
Or couldn’t they be sitting on a bus?

17.

2009-05-27T18:47:00.004+10:00

And I’ll say, WHAT? ARE YOU KIDDING? LEAVE MY FAMILY ALONE!! THEY ARE PERFECT EXACTLY AS THEY ARE!!

18.

2009-05-27T18:47:00.003+10:00

Then, a few days later, I’ll say, well. All right. Some of those suggestions are not so bad. Thanks.
But the boat is not a bus. It stays a boat.

19.

2009-05-27T18:46:00.002+10:00

There’s some combination of keys that I accidentally press here on my keyboard, and suddenly I find that I’m typing in Chinese.
It makes me feel uneasy, as if I’m spilling lemongrass tea.
Wait, and I’ll go back to English.

20.

2009-05-27T18:40:00.009+10:00

Look. Here are some photos of Charlie with his cousin George.
George is the son of my sister, Liane Moriarty. She’s a writer too, and her latest book, What Alice Forgot, is perfect, rich, funny, complex, engaging, smart, breathtaking and heartbreaking. You’ll stay up half the night reading it.
Here’s the first review I can find:

“[Liane Moriarty] writes acute social comedies of the feminine, where the domestic is more political than cosy. In this, Moriaty’s third novel, Alice is a housewife who loses 10 years of her memory in a gym accident. She thinks she is 29, in love and pregnant, when actually she is a divorcing mother of three. Technically this premise is a challenge, which Moriarty makes appear effortless. The humour arises partly from fear of change, whether of age, or new technology. Alice battles three challenging children, a hostile husband, a boyfriend she simply can’t recall. … bravura depiction. Great stuff,"

So, like I said, here are some pictures of Charlie and George.

21.

2009-05-27T18:38:00.004+10:00

Just got an e-mail from Amazon. As someone who once bought a book about poisons, I might now want to buy a book called Application of Solution Protein Chemistry to Biotechnology.
I bought the book about poisons for research for Bindy Mackenzie. Not because I wanted to poison anybody.

22.

2009-05-27T18:38:00.003+10:00

Well, I have a lot more to say but the hours dissolve so I should stop.

23.

2009-05-27T18:37:00.002+10:00

Here’s something funny. I just dissolved some more hours looking through the junkmail on my bookshelf. Trying to find where those words came from - the hours dissolve, the words that caught my eye. And they’re not there.
I must have imagined them.
Sometimes I think I should wear my glasses around the house more often than I do.

24.

2009-05-27T18:36:00.005+10:00

Just the other day Charlie held up a toy from across the room and said to me, “What’s this?”
“It’s a pterodactyl,” I said.
Charlie looked at the toy.
“No,” he said. “I think it’s a puppy.”
He was right, too.

25.

2009-05-27T18:36:00.004+10:00

About that bowl of mandarin peels, apple core, old tea bag on my desk. It reminds me of a construction site. Or Montreal after the snow has melted.

26.

2009-05-27T18:34:00.002+10:00

Just went downstairs to empty the bowl, throw it all away, make another cup of tea, and there was Charlie at the kitchen sink. Standing on a small table, wearing his pyjamas, sleeves pushed up to the elbows, gumboots on his feet, washing up in soapy water. Something warm and delicious about the kitchen, something glowing dimly from inside the oven. I said, “Have you been baking?”
And Charlie’s lovely babysitter said, “Yes, we made scones; they’re almost ready.”
In the bowl on my desk now: a warm and golden scone with raspberry jam, some chocolate, and a mandarin. Beside it, a cup of peppermint tea.
The hours are beautiful.

Very Important News

2008-09-20T17:33:00.002+10:00

From Monday, 22 September, for one month, I am going to be the writer-in-residence at Insideadog.com.au. What this means is that I will be blogging there. It also means that things are going to change. For one month, I am going to be blogging regularly: every couple of days, even. I don’t know if I can, but that’s the plan.

If I knew how to hyperlink I would send you there now. I hope you can find your own way. If not, never mind. In a month, I will be back.

In other important news, my computer crashed. It is gone. Most things have been saved but I have lost some e-mail – including a folder of reader mail received in the last few months. I reply to all reader mail eventually, so if you have not heard from me, and months have gone by, it probably means that you are one of the lost ones. I am very sorry. If you like, you can resend your e-mails and then I will reply.

What else? Well, I am now on facebook. Please come and be my friend. So far, I’ve got nothing in the way of a profile so I offer almost nothing to friends. But that's gonna change.

Also, Charlie turned two. I made him a caterpillar cake. It was multi-coloured with coconut fur and jellybean feet. The eyes were the best part. They were smarties stuck to large white mints. As soon as I attached the eyes, the caterpillar came alive.

But I missed the party because I had the flu. I have now seen the party photos - and the caterpillar’s eyes are gone. They must have fallen off on the journey, and nobody knew to re-attach them. This makes me very sad.

I am still working on my new Ashbury- Brookfield book. It’s a ghost story, but so far not scary at all. That’s gotta change. A lot of things changing around here.

Finally, my television broke. I woke up the other morning and its red light had gone out. Someone slipped into my house in the middle of the night and blew it out. Or maybe the tv was lonely for its distant planet? I don’t know how to rekindle its heartlight.

Anyway, no tv. But that news might only be important to me.

What a good idea, to go by ninky nonk

2008-05-13T23:32:00.002+10:00

Charlie woke with a cold and I heard him from my room, talking to himself: a sneezing, a murmuring, a sneezing, an earnest narrative. Sometimes a scolding. He was figuring something. It was a long, low, murmuring, scolding dissertation in there. Eventually, it was quiet. I went in. He was standing. He looked calm and determined. He pointed to his nose and said, “Nose.” “That’s ri—” I began. But he wasn’t done. Now he concentrated hard, watched my face and said: “Sticky.”
“You’ve got a sticky nose!” I said.
His whole body relaxed, the beautiful relief of being understood.
I changed his nappy and he kicked his legs out, cranky now about his sticky nose. His foot went smack into my eye. I was feeling a little low myself. I asked him to stop kicking. I tried to explain. “It’s just that I really don’t feel like being kicked in the eye today,” I said.
I switched on children’s breakfast television. Imaginary creatures climbing aboard a multi-coloured, flying caravan.
“What a good idea,” the narrator enthused, “to go by ninky nonk!”
I thought of all the curious sentences floating around my house.

It was Mother's Day, the Other Day

2008-05-13T23:29:00.005+10:00

The last few weeks I’d find junk mail advertising mother's day gifts and I’d say: “Huh, that’s right. Mother's Day coming up soon.” I’d say, “Um, I think that’s when people get breakfast in bed?” I’d say, “Mothers, I mean. When I say people, I mean mothers.” I’d say, “Pancakes. When I say breakfast? I mean pancakes.”
And so on.
But Charlie must have been thinking of other things

The Story of the Lost Sock

2008-05-13T23:29:00.004+10:00

Remind me to tell you the story of the lost sock, one of these days.

Once, watching Play School

2008-05-13T23:27:00.001+10:00

Once, watching Play School, a while back now, I saw that the teddy bear, dressed as a lion, was searching for a lost ball of wool.
“Getting hotter, getting hotter, oh, now you’re cold!” said the Play School host.
Suddenly, I felt overwhelmed. All the things to teach Charlie about the world! What was that creature, for a start? Was it a teddy bear or lion? What did it want with the ball of wool?
And how to explain that getting hotter means you’re almost there? Why, after all, is burning so right and freezing wrong?

Pangea Day

2008-05-13T23:26:00.001+10:00

Still, on the morning of Mother's Day, I said, “Charlie, say Happy Mother's Day” and he looked at me and said, “Happy. Day.”
The afternoon of Happy. Day I drove into the city for a rerun of Pangea Day. It was in a conference room up high. Harbour bridge lights in picture windows. Floating champagne. Another mother said to me, “I’m glad we didn’t bring our boys.” We looked around the room and it changed. Now it was a beautiful expanse for running; now it was white cloths to tug heavy glasses to the floor.
But this Pangea Day. It was a global event bringing the world together through film. Everybody watching the exact same films at the exact same time around the world.
Not so much us though. I mean, for us, it was a rerun from yesterday.
But I still felt excited.
Yesterday’s audiences flashed onto the screen now and then, and some of them looked cold. The parties woohooing around the world, but sometimes they looked separate to me, oddly huddled. Some of them seemed impatient or not quite there, and some felt almost like ghosts.
But maybe I was just too conscious that they were yesterday. I was tomorrow.

Now, no disrespect, but I wonder if it might have been better just to show the films? Without the presenters, I mean. Once, a presenter said: “This film is only two minutes long but it packs quite a punch!” Then a two minute film and all around the world, audiences waiting for the punch. So, of course. I mean, the whole world had its defences up.

Trouble with the Neighbours

2008-05-13T23:24:00.006+10:00

Time was, the neighbours were ghosts. They come and go, I said, at the strangest hours. Could not see their faces for bright lights. Murmuring names. A black dog. A dark-haired girl whose eyes slid sideways when I said hello to her. She seemed close to the dog, the dark-haired girl. She seemed to live a separate life to the man and woman who stood in the shadow of bright light.
Separate ghosts in the house next door.
And then this happened:
One day, I saw the dark-haired girl slam the door of a van and drive away. On the side of the van: PERKY PETS.
Everything fell into place.
That dark-haired girl doesn’t live in the house next door. She’s a dog walker. Of course she leads a separate life. Of course she comes and goes in the middle of the day. Of course she has a relationship with the dog. She walks it.

I went to New York and asked the neighbours to collect my mail. Do you know what they did? They fixed my mailbox. It was loose, hanging by a thread, my mailbox lid. If it had been a tooth you could have got your dad to grab it in a handkerchief and wrench it from your mouth. It wouldn’t have hurt at all. Next day, money from the tooth fairy.
But my mailbox lid, the screws almost all gone, hanging loose. And the neighbours fixed it tightly back, so the lid doesn’t clatter sideways anymore when I lift it in the rain.

At easter time, the neighbours came over for Charlie’s first Easter Egg Hunt. They hid the Easter Eggs. They hid them ingeniously: I mean, for a 1-year-old, it turns out you hide the easter eggs in plain sight.
And while Charlie searched, in an ecstasy of suspense, the neighbours said: “Getting warmer, getting warmer, cold! Cold! Cold!”
He understood.
Nobody explained.
Such a beautiful calm overcame me.

The trouble is: no ghosts any more, just fine and lovely people, so where’s the story?

Unless

2008-05-13T23:23:00.001+10:00

Unless I tell them I’ve been blogging about them? I could tell them that. They might not like it. There could be open hostilities.
Or better, they could pretend not to mind. They could laugh and say that’s okay. Yet secretly, they’d simmer. Begin to plot some form of ingenious revenge. Hide their revenge in plain sight. Drill small holes in the wall between our houses.
I don’t know why they’d be drilling small holes. But they’d know.
That might be a story.

The Neighbours on the Other Side

2008-05-13T23:22:00.001+10:00

The neighbours on the other side are no help. Once I thought their house was on fire but it was only a candle flame moving about behind a window. Also, the other day, the girl from that house was out the front with a can of insect repellant.
“Watch out!” she said to me. “I just found a redback spider in my mailbox.”
She offered to spray my mailbox, in case there was one there too.
People around these parts are just too kind, that’s the trouble. Particularly when it comes to mailboxes.

What I am working on Right Now

2008-05-13T23:19:00.003+10:00

I am writing the next book in the Ashbury-Brookfield series.
Just to explain: the Ashbury-Brookfield series began with Feeling Sorry for Celia, a book set at a private school called Ashbury, and also at a nearby public school called Brookfield.
This was followed by Finding Cassie Crazy (also known as The Year of Secret Assignments).
And then Bindy Mackenzie.
Each story is independent of the others, although sometimes characters wander between books.
You are welcome to read the books in any order that you like.
The important thing – the essential thing – is that you read them.

The next book, the one I’m writing now, takes place in the year following Bindy Mackenzie. It features two new characters named Riley and Amelia. Also starring Emily and Lydia from The Year of Secret Assignments, and Toby from Bindy Mackenzie.
I cannot say what this book will be called.
But I can say that it is a ghost story.

The Last Four Months

2008-04-09T18:57:00.005+10:00

I hear you’re supposed to update your blog more regularly than I do.
The last time I wrote was in, what? December. So. That’s four months ago. I was thinking: “That’s not so bad. Four months! What can happen in four months?”
But now I hear there are people who blog every day.
So.
I have to catch up!
In this post, I will describe every day of my last four months.

I’ll begin with today.
At the moment, I am sitting at my desk and there is a midnight-blue ceramic bowl beside me. You know what, it’s not midnight blue. More a deep cobalt blue. No. Listen, I’ll take a photo of the bowl and post it here.
Great, so, setting aside the colour of the bowl.
Inside the bowl I have some grapes, a sliced-up orange, a plum, and two squares of Lindt 70% Dark Chocolate.
The plum is gone now. I ate it while I was thinking about the next sentence.
Huh. Now the grapes are gone too. A similar thing happened to them.

Outside, there is a very blue sky. The blue is nothing like the colour of the bowl beside me. Nothing at all. Also outside: it’s blustery. Right this moment, the bluster has stopped but the ferns at my window are still trembling.
There goes an aeroplane.
An e-mail just arrived!
Oh. It was just Shopfast with an Urgent Product Recall for Rogan Josh Simmer Sauce 540g. I don’t have any.

Charlie is asleep in his cot in his room next door.

This morning, Charlie woke at 6.30, and said, “Breakfast?”
“No, no,” I said, keeping my voice low and sleepy. “It’s sleeping time.”
Charlie yawned. I moved in closer, consolidating. “It’s the middle of the night!” I laughed gently and smoothed the sheet over him. “You go back to sleep now. Morning’s not for hours and hours!”
As soon as I said it, I knew I’d gone too far. He sat straight up and gave me a quick, shrewd look.
Then he turned to the window.
“Hey, Charlie! Here’s Teddy! He wants you to go to sleep!”
Charlie ignored me, looking around the waving Teddy, his gaze fixed on the window. A gleam of light hit the sill just beneath the curtain.
That was all he needed.
He stood up, gathered his yellow blanket underneath his arm, and announced, firmly: “BREAKFAST.”

My favourite breakfast television is Playschool, but oh no, we were much too early for that.
We were also too early for the animated boy named Poko. I like Poko too. He has such green eyes! And each episode something goes wrong, like the time when Poko was trying to bake a pie but the dog kept throwing its squeeze-toy into the pastry.

After breakfast, we walked up the street, Charlie in his stroller.
In the windows of the kindergarten classrooms at the local primary school:

TERRIFIC
TURTLES
T T T

At the store, we bought Pink Lady apples and October Sun plums.
I saw a woman who looked a lot like the actress, Toni Collette. A few moments later, I saw another woman who looked a lot like Toni Collette.
What are the chances of two Toni Collette look-alikes on the same street on the same day? Zero. So one of them must have been her.

At the video shop, I chose a Hi-5 DVD for Charlie. I handed over the DVD cover, my membership card, and the password. All that handing over. It seemed enough. But then I had to pay.
“I always forget about paying!” I said.
“That’s all right,” the young man said, “I’m here to remind you.”

Next, we went to the park and Charlie said, “Green”, heading to the green slide. Then he paused, and changed his mind. “Yellow,” he decided, and turned to the yellow slide instead.
I looked around to see if the other mothers had noticed. My baby knows his colours! But nobody seemed to be watching.
In this particular park, alongside the slides, there’s a miniature surfboard on springs.
I’ve seen kids of, what? Five? Six? I’ve seen them climb onto that miniature surfboard on springs, stand up and balance a few seconds.
Today, Charlie climbed on it. He stood there, swaying gently, arms out exactly like a surfer riding a wave - for what? A minute? More?
I looked around to see if the other mothers had noticed.
They were all facing away.
‘Charlie!” I said. “That’s great balance!” A mother finally turned in our direction. At that exact moment Charlie tipped forward and fell into my arms. The mother smiled fondly and turned away again.
He did it on purpose, you know. The tipping forward into my arms? He was ready to get off.

I thought about a few things on the walk home from the park.
One thing I thought about was the fact that I often spill water. I mean, when I’m carrying a lot of stuff, including maybe a small child and a glass of water, from one room to the next – well, I often forget that you can’t hold the glass of water sideways.
Also, I thought about something I once read: that you feel your most creative when you’re almost asleep.
Last night, Charlie woke at 1 am, 2 am and 3 am. Then, at 4 am, I woke to the sound of footsteps. A group of people in heavy workboots were running through the house downstairs.
“WHO’S IN MY HOUSE?! WHO’S IN MY HOUSE?!” I shouted. Then I screamed, a big, beautiful scream, to scare them away.
What were they doing in my house! In the middle of the night! And why were they running?! Why not walk?! Why the heavy boots?! Was there construction work in the living room?! Then why hadn’t somebody –
Then I realised I was dreaming.
Nobody was running through the house downstairs.
But the beautiful scream had woken Charlie, of course, and he was so confused I had to read him three picture books and sing him back to sleep.
(So, technically, Charlie, if you’re reading this, 6.30 was the middle of the night.)
And walking home from the park today, I felt at my most creative.

Charlie, too, I guess.
He fell asleep in his stroller.

The transfer from the stroller to the cot was successful!
I closed his bedroom door, went downstairs, got the blue bowl, sliced up an orange, added some grapes, a plum, and two squares of Lindt 70% Chocolate and came upstairs to work.
Here I am now.
I’m about to begin work. I’m halfway through the next Ashbury-Brookfield book.
But how can I write? The blue bowl is empty! Just orange peels.
And my camera batteries are dead! So I cannot photograph the blue.

But, setting aside the colour of the bowl, it looks like I’ve completed today.
I’m right up to the now!
So.
Yesterday is next.

Yesterday

2008-04-09T18:56:00.004+10:00

It might be better to summarise the last four months.

In the last four months, Charlie and I have been to New York, to the hospital, to the Gold Coast, to the park, to the park, to the park.

I’ll post some brief notes below. I’ll skip the park. But I might include a copy of a letter that Charlie wrote to me, shortly after the hospital but before the trip to the Gold Coast.

1. Flight to New York

2008-04-09T18:55:00.003+10:00

“Look,” I said, “Here’s the people on the plane, and she says, ow, my back hurts and he’s getting something down from an overhead locker, and here’s a monster, raaar! I think it’s a possum. And here’s a telephone, ring ring! Quick! Switch it off! And look, it’s a baby! And all the people are going oh, no, a baby, and what’s she putting on the baby’s face? Don’t worry. And here’s a boat! And it goes splash splash and all the boats sail away from the plane hooray and here’s a lady saying look, I’ve made a slide! Like in the park! And hooray! We all go down the slide. And she says, come on everyone let’s go down the slide, and they go hooray! And then they run! And – ”

On the flight to New York, Charlie had absolutely no interest in any of the books or toys or boxes of sultanas that I’d brought along to keep him entertained.
The only thing that made him happy was the Emergency Information Card, over and over, at high speed.

2. Pull Back 'n Go Santa

2008-04-09T18:53:00.004+10:00

The first week in New York, a Canadian friend and I went to the Catskills. We left late at night and my friend drove the rental car straight into a snow storm.
But you can’t blame her for that.
It was the weather.

We stayed in another friend’s beautiful house in the woods. Charlie learned to walk there.

In the grocery store, I decided to buy a small toy for him, to celebrate. But all I could see were snub nose revolvers.
Eventually, I found a Pull Back ‘n Go Santa Head. It’s just what it says it is. It's a small plastic Santa head and if you pull it back, it goes.
Charlie likes it; I love it.

Driving back to the city, we saw what we’d missed in the dark snow-storm drive on the way up. We were quiet and thoughtful. The road looped and curved along a cliff edge.
“I didn’t know the cliff was there,” I said.
“Me neither,” agreed my friend.
We were quiet again.
Eventually, I said, half-laughing: “I can’t remember all these curves in the road. I can only remember driving in a long, straight line.”
My friend said, “I was thinking the same thing.”

3. Writer

2008-04-09T18:50:00.006+10:00

Back in the city, I was promoting the Spell Book of Listen Taylor. I met teachers, librarians, booksellers, publishers and writers, and you know, I think I liked them all.
Especially, I liked hangin’ with some fantastic friends, including Arthur Levine, Jill Grinberg and Rachel Cohn. Such wonderful people.
And Rachel, the author of Cupcakes, gave Charlie and me cupcakes.
Anyway, one night I was walking to dinner with a group of children’s book writers and publishers. They were talking about the theatre strike in New York. This one writer I was walking alongside, declared, with passion: “I fully support that strike.”
“What are the issues?” I asked him, and he said that he didn’t have a clue.

4. Dream

2008-04-09T18:49:00.003+10:00

I felt fond of the writer. That much passion for a cause without knowing what it was about. He must be a loyal friend.
At dinner, I asked the writer some questions about his books. But then I remembered a dream I had had just the night before.
In the dream, I was at a party with a friend who plays the drums. The party was on a ship. I was chatting to my friend, asking him about drumming. He gave me a wistful smile and shook his head. “At a party,” he said, “we don’t talk about our work.” Then he pointed to a corkboard where my name had been shifted to the right, as a penalty for talking about work.
Remembering the dream, I said to the writer: “I’m sorry to ask you about work.”
But he didn’t seem to mind.

5. Flight Attendant

2008-04-09T18:48:00.002+10:00

The only rule for flying with a baby is: make sure the baby is sucking on something when the flight goes up and comes down. Because of his ears.
That’s what everybody told me.
On the flight home from New York, we were preparing for descent, and I was glad to see that Charlie was sucking his thumb.
Then a flight attendant stopped alongside us. She reached over, pulled Charlie’s thumb out of his mouth, put it into her own mouth, spat it out, said, “Ew! Boy germs!” then hurried on down the aisle.
That is a true story.
The consternation on Charlie’s face. To be honest, he and I were both in shock.

6. Looping

2008-04-09T18:46:00.002+10:00

After New York, a week at home, then Charlie was in the hospital for five days. I was allowed to sleep on a fold-out couch beside him.

The day we got home from the hospital, I said, ‘Let’s get some fresh air straight away.’ I said, ‘We’ll leave the bags in the hallway by the door and get some fresh air straight away.’
MST CHARLIE, the hospital wrist band looped around his wrist, his bare feet stretching in the stroller, flexing his toes in the breeze. The baggage tags still looped the stroller frame.
We walked up the quiet afternoon hill past the jacaranda trees. When we left for New York they were vibrant in their purple, now the purple was gathering into itself, and into the summer green.
‘We’ll loop around the block past the corner store,’ I said, ‘you want to say hello to the people in the store?’
“Bye bye,” he replied, calmly and precisely, from his stroller.
He was remembering that the corner store was the first place he ever said ‘bye bye’.

7. Letter from Charlie

2008-04-09T18:45:00.002+10:00

The following is a transcript of a typed document that I found one morning, neatly folded, in the corner of Charlie’s cot. I checked the room carefully but there was no evidence of intrusion: the window was still locked, the curtains drawn, etc. Charlie himself seemed in good spirits. He was standing up, asking for breakfast, all in accordance with his usual morning behaviour. There was, however, the faintest pause in his bouncing when I said, “Hey, what’s that?”and reached for the folded document in his cot – and then, too, a slight nod, as of approval, when I opened it and read it. However, almost immediately he resumed his bouncing, now holding out both hands to me, his song taking on the mildly scolding tone that indicates I’m taking much too long.

In the circumstances, I can only conclude that Charlie himself is the author of what follows:

My Dear Mum,

The moon is bright tonight.

That is fortunate. I have slipped from this room, already, once, to borrow this clackety typewriter (from a friend who runs a pawn shop) – and must slip away again, before dawn, to return it. The streets are quiet but my walking is not what it will be. I tip over sideways, on occasion, and, in all honesty, would prefer to maintain my balance by holding both hands aloft. Tricky, when carrying a typewriter.

Hence, the moonlight is a blessing.

I write, now, from my cot, to raise a serious issue.

First, let me say, that New York was an excellent vacation choice. I commend you for it, Mum. Central Park was surely the most comprehensive park we have ever attended. And the squirrels! (So funny.) The spaghetti sauce at Niko’s (on Broadway and 76th) was divine. The cupcakes! Then, too, I think you know how much I enjoyed the New York travel cots. Unlike my own cot here, which has wooden slats, their netted material was perfect for bouncing against. Here, as you probably know, I sometimes wake myself in the middle of the night with a thunk: my head banging against the wooden slats. Not so in New York.

Yes. New York was great.

But, then, directly after New York, there was the trip to Hospital.

Mum. Seriously. What were you thinking?

All right. Anyone can make a mistake. Maybe the brochures were misleading. Five star reviews on expedia.com? It happens all the time: holiday choices go horribly wrong. But once you know you’ve been duped, Mum, you just go home.

Oh, I tried to tell you. I pointed, repeatedly, at the exit door. But no, you kept on believing. I assume you were hoping that things would get better. Your sunny optimism is a virtue, I’m sure, but let’s be honest here: as a holiday choice, Hospital is catastrophic.

I won’t go into details – you were there, you saw it all. But I might remind you that I could not sleep for the incessant beeping of the machines around my bed. Fun during the day, I suppose – I do like beeping noises. But why did they not switch them off at night? Then, too, I suppose all the tubes and gadgets that they attached to me might have been entertaining. But I was not allowed to play with any of it. So what was the point? And that’s even if I had felt like playing which, to be honest, I did not. I felt extremely under the weather for most of the stay – another reason why we should have just packed up and gone home.

And I don’t even want to talk about my thumb. Let’s just say that I had believed that the incident with the flight attendant – insulting the taste of my thumb – was the worst thing that ever could happen to me vis-à-vis it. But to swaddle my hand in bandaging so I could not access my thumb? To put it bluntly, it became very clear to me, around this time, that the only thing I can rely on in this great, big, strange, old world is my yellow blanket.

I do not mean to offend you. I’m sure you were doing your best; I’m sure you genuinely believed that Hospital would be fun.

But that’s exactly why I’m writing this letter: because now I hear we’re going to the Gold Coast.

Look, I know nothing of this Gold Coast. I’ve never been there. Maybe it’s great? Maybe it’s another New York?

But how do we know it’s not a Hospital?

I just don’t think I can take that chance, Mum.

Look, I’m not suggesting that you should be as risk-averse as I am. You want to try the Gold Coast? Go for your life! Go crazy!

But I’d like to stay at home.

Now, please – I know you’re about to dismiss this suggestion – laugh at it, even. “You’re a baby! You can’t stay home alone!” That’s what you’re going to say. I can just hear you.

All I’m asking is that you think about it – that you give it some serious thought.
And when you do, consider this:

I am almost 18 months old. (You keep calling me a ‘baby’ but seriously, am I? A lot of folk would label me ‘toddler’ - or even ‘little boy’?) I know where you keep the food. (It’s in the fridge, right? And the cupboards? If you could move things down to the lower shelves, access would be easier.) I know where the laundry detergent is. (Please remove the childproof locks from the cupboards, though, at your earliest convenience.) So I can do my own laundry. And if you put my favourite Hi-5 DVD on repeat, I won’t need to mess with the tv remote controls.

Starting to seem almost possible? I thought so.

And there's this: in an emergency I can always call on my best friend down the street. She may be a few weeks younger than me but you will recall that she can recite the alphabet, count to twenty, and tell you what the weather’s like (if it’s ‘sunny’).

This letter has gone on long enough. I think I have made my point, and I must get the typewriter back.

I leave the decision – as all decisions – in your hands. I am hopeful.

I thank you in advance,
And remain,

Your,

Charlie

PS And just so you know, when I said, ‘bye bye’ in the stroller the day after we got home the hospital? I wasn’t ‘recalling that I learned to say good bye in the corner store’. No. I meant: enough with the sentimentality about ‘looping’. I meant, get a pair of scissors, cut the nametags off, and take me to the park already.

8. The Day After the Gold Coast

2008-04-09T18:37:00.004+10:00

The Gold Coast was for the Somerset Celebration of Literature. It was one of the best festivals I’ve ever been to. The hotel had a parrot in a cage just outside reception. Charlie came along, and so did my wonderful parents – they took care of him while I was at speaking and signing events. And a lovely student volunteer made sure I got to the events on time.

The day after we got home from the Gold Coast, Charlie woke in the morning and said: “Bird.”
“Bird?” I said, uneasily, looking around his room.
There was a picture book with a duck on the front cover on the floor.
“Ah!” I said. “Yes! Charlie, this is a kind of bird! It’s a duck! You know ducks! What noise does a duck make?”
Charlie set the book aside and repeated, firmly: “Bird.”
“Bird!” I agreed, and he seemed pleased.
We went downstairs, and he called, “Bird! Bird!” all the way. He looked around the living room expectantly – a small frown flickered across his face. I put him down, and he began to run. He ran down the hallway and into the kitchen; he ran back into the living room; he spun around; looked at me; ran to the front door. All the time he ran he was calling, “Bird! Bird!” and each “Bird!” was more frantic than the last, until he was actually sobbing, “Bird!” and then he was only sobbing.
Suddenly, I realised what it was.
Each morning at the Gold Coast, we had begun the day by visiting the parrot at reception.
He was thinking of the parrot. If he could just find the parrot, he thought, he'd find the Gold Coast again – that bird would unravel that whole strange, idyllic world of lizards, beaches, pancakes; of heavy doors propped open that lead you into rooms where grandparents play and play; of dolphins, boats, pelicans, and water that surprises you by leaping from the ground beneath your feet.

Bindy Mackenzie wins Davitt Award

2007-12-02T22:05:00.001+11:00

I am very happy and proud to announce that Bindy Mackenzie has won the 2007 Davitt Award for Best Young Adult Crime Novel. The award is administered by the Sisters in Crime. I would have loved to attend the prize ceremony in Melbourne but I am just back from a few weeks in New York, where I was speaking at the NCTE Conference, and promoting The Spell Book of Listen Taylor, and taking Charlie to Central Park. As soon as I wake up, I will write about the trip to New York. In the meantime, here's Charlie in Central Park.

Letter to Charlie #5

2007-09-26T22:52:00.000+10:00

Dear Charlie,

I notice you haven’t replied to any of my letters.
I know that you are very busy. There’s the sleeping, eating, and going to the park. There’s the whole becoming a “person” and “figuring out the world”, etc. Not to mention practising your animal sounds.
I do see how busy you are.
So, maybe, you could post a comment? Just so I know you’re getting these?

Thanks, and
Much love,
Your Mum

Ben and Jerry's Factory

2007-09-26T22:37:00.000+10:00

I kicked my toe on the fireplace. My sister was in the room at the time, playing with Charlie. I thought: Don’t say a word! Because I knew if my sister said, “Oh, you kicked your toe, are you okay?” my head would explode. I knew that.
She did not say a word. She just kept on playing with Charlie. I waited a moment and then left the room. I felt extremely grateful to my sister. There had been a silent communication between us – a beautiful understanding.
This was weeks ago. The other day, taking Charlie to the doctor for his 12 months shots, I said, “Look, there’s nothing you can do about a toe, is there?”
The doctor was silent. She gazed at me.
“I mean,” I said, “if I kicked my toe weeks ago and it still really, really hurts – I mean, it still makes me go aaah! just when I’m walking along – well, it’ll heal itself eventually, right?”
She asked me to take off my shoe.
“It’s swollen to twice its size and it’s quite crooked!” she exclaimed. I wasn’t sure if she was pleased or angry.
She told me to get x-rays.
“But,” I said, carefully, “even if it’s broken, I mean, there’s nothing – I mean, what could you do?”
“That,” she said, “is a multiple choice question.”
So I got the x-rays. They tied a ribbon around the other toes to pull them apart from the crooked one for the photos.
The x-ray report said that the toe was fractured. Charlie, I said, this is my first ever fracture. One day, I said, this toe will predict rain.
The doctor said it was a good fracture. She sent me to a podiatrist. The podiatrist trimmed my toenails for me, and told me she’d once lived in Burlington, Vermont.
“We spent a lot of time,” she said, “at the Ben and Jerry’s factory.”
She said she was going to make a splint for the toe. But the splint was a disappointment. It looked exactly like squashed pink bubble gum.
The whole time I was there, she kept Charlie entertained by handing him objects to play with. He was sitting on my lap on the white reclining chair.
The first object she gave him was a foot.
“Don’t worry,” she told me, “it’s just bones.”
Then she murmured to herself, “Not real bones.”

Later, it emerged that my sister had not even noticed me kicking my toe. That’s why she hadn’t said a word.
“I can’t believe you broke your toe,” she said, “and didn’t say anything. That’s so - ”
I thought she was going to say ‘brave’. I was ready with a brave, modest smile.
“That’s so weird,” she said.

Letter to Charlie #4

2007-09-26T22:31:00.000+10:00

Dear Charlie,

You know how you sometimes try to take the nose right off my face, by grabbing it with your hand and twisting hard? And you know how, when you do that, I shriek?
That’s because you won’t let me cut your fingernails.

Much love,
Your Mum

Letter to Charlie #3

2007-09-26T22:25:00.000+10:00

Dear Charlie,

In the mornings, when I come into your room, you are often sitting up in your cot with your thumb in your mouth, looking thoughtful. When you see me, you give me a dazzling smile, which is very kind of you.
And then, immediately, you say, “Ah!” and point to the window.
Next, you turn toward the book shelf and say “Ah!”
Finally, you declare, “Ah!” as you point to the chest of drawers.
So, my question is: why?
Is there something you need to communicate to me about the window, shelf and drawers? Do you need to be carried across to them? Do you want something passed to you from the window, shelf and drawers? Would you like me to remind you what they’re called?
Or are you simply surprised that they’re still there?

Much love,
Your Mum

The Party

2007-09-26T22:18:00.000+10:00

It was the Twentieth Anniversary Party of Next Chapter Books in Warriewood. There were lucky door prizes and hors-d'oeuvres and some friendly writers: the lovely Michael Robotham (who ghost wrote Geri Halliwell’s autobiography, and also has best sellers of his own); a woman with a new slant on astrology; a writer of novels about surfing.
I sat at a table to sign books and a young man approached. He had a beard and a glass of champagne.
“Tell me about myself,” he said, very smooth.
I thought about that for a moment.
“Do you mean,” I said, eventually, “tell you about myself?”
“No.” He was emphatic. “Tell me about myself.”
After a moment, I murmured, helplessly, “But where do I know you from?”
The young man looked stern. He straightened up.
“You’re a clairvoyant!” he cried. “Tell me about myself!”
I had to explain that I was not a clairvoyant.
“The astrologer,” I realised. “She’s over there. These are fiction,” I said. “I write fiction.”
“Do you?” he said, moodily. He looked down at my piles of books and wandered away.