I slick down my hair to leave at quarter to eight and grab my scuffed Gladstone bag. There is no goodbye kiss before I set off down the driveway of grey coastal sand past the kero drum letterbox where I placed a camouflaged dead copperhead to scare the mailman. After their death they reputedly writhe for twenty-four hours. Snakes, not mailmen. Slogging through eucalyptus-scented heat, dust, and flies, I reach Ernie Hough’s lone crossroads store like a Hopper painting in my future discoveries to wait for Mr Phillips’s slow Bedford bus, a rattling relic of the past I shun, but that, of course, will change.

Slouching aboard I see likeable Heather Lord who shall die in a fiery wreck with her fiancé eight years on at a spot she will cross this morning on this bus. Another discovery ahead, life’s fragility hit me hard reading this on my newspaper’s front page at my then work bus stop. Bob Marshall gets on like a lusty hero admiring Sheila Savage, a senior girl with wonderful hair, sullen kids from her Catholic school staring. Before Heather’s death he will play football for the big league team I love, his dream, his future discovery, soon shattered at nineteen by damaged kidneys. When we arrive I have a quick drag of the smoke I rolled at the bus stop, skipping assembly in the toilets.

First up is music with Ruth who is kind but can’t control us with just a tuning fork. Then (groan) we all pipe down for the tyranny of Col Baker who wields the strap harder than any despot throughout history which is what he teaches. He also coaches the senior football team. Later, we have art with Ma Johns whose melancholia I shall recognise many discoveries ahead. When she shows us these luminous prints, their colours, heroic, such a shock they jump-start my willful heart, it sabotages my usual effective disruptive tactics.

Abetted by my older sister who escaped earlier I farewell school and parents for the city to lodge in the narrow house of Miss Ferguson, a retired clerical assistant, a maiden landlady whose voice quivers, her loose dentures clicking softly. Before dusk, golden shafts of light penetrate the gloom, dust motes at play in this reek of the past, this silence, except for the ticking of a large antique clock in her parlour. I avoid engaging her, brusque but not impolite, always paying my rent on time, barely affordable on my wages even with my age bumped up. I roam afar, exploring, charting my map of old streets. In my future discoveries I am to read a gem of a book about the enigma of arrival.

Indifferent to Miss Ferguson’s rules, her fussy routine, I bypass the privy in the rear porch to piss on her grass, killing it. Although I must use the kitchen, not paying full board, it irks her. She disapproves of my vegetable veto, and just about everything else I do, or don’t. Cleaning up in seconds after scoffing tomato sauce on toast I prowl the neighbourhood becoming familiar, steam hissing from vents amidst sudden shouts. I celebrate this newfound freedom, including joining a library, but fear it going awry. My work attendance—my survival—is meticulous.

Miss Ferguson doesn’t mind me smoking, its aroma reminding her of her dead father, and tells me my surly expression, which I nurture, spoils my looks as I sense her warming to me. Being too young to attract girlfriends is my saving grace in her eyes but eventually in this urgent time of flux I do meet a girl. Miss Ferguson, after tapping on my door, warns me of the no girls in my room rule, news to me, prompting a rare smile I let slip closing the door again gently in her face. More girls shall follow, florid, dressing like tarts, according to her. She also says they sound as if they have a good time beyond that door. I know I do.

She prefers our old days, that earlier time of loneliness and scowling and cinema-fed posing, these memories already embarrassing me. Girls were still a fantasy when I dressed my room’s bare walls with sticky-taped scissored pictures. In the dim passageway resounding with my infernal—her word I rather like—rock’n’roll—playing, she remains as still as a mouse when the music stops. Her heart a trapped bird’s wings, she strains to hear a muffled throb she has never discovered.