Free Everywhere I Look by Helen Garner

Bridport Street: ‘So I said to him, “If I wasn’t your girlfriend, I’d be really concerned about your sexuality.”’

    I bring home some chocolates shaped like pyramids. Ted comes in to ask me for one. He struggles to articulate their shape, and comes up with ‘a desert point’.

    At David and Jason’s in Newcastle, Jason makes me watch a few songs from Kylie’s Homecoming Tour. It’s a bloated spectacle of lights like a Nazi rally, the ‘dancing’ vulgar and clumsy, the songs a series of tiny ideas inflated beyond any possibility of meaning, and Kylie herself a minuscule creature with a very pretty profile and a surprisingly sweet smile. Now that she’s had breast cancer and lost her French boyfriend, she looks almost interesting, her face thinner, darker, shadowed perhaps by adult pain and loss. I find her endearing. David is bored by her. But Jason adores her and seems proud of her. He shows Olive a single sequin that flew off her costume and into his hand when he was in the front row. Together they examine it, reverently, like a religious relic.

    As the vodka kicks in I begin to make plans. I will go to my office and start work at eight every morning. I will stop drinking coffee and eating lollies. I will hire someone to pluck my eyebrows into shape once a week.

    Library Week at the local primary school and I am invited to give a talk one afternoon. A boy of nine or so, in a dark-brimmed hat, sits in the front row. He is fidgety at first, then sits stiller and stiller, with his eyes fixed on my face. At the end he comes up with his parents, addresses me by my full name: they have a copy of my book that they would like me to inscribe.
    Me: ‘Is it to somebody?’
    Boy: ‘To our whole family, actually.’
    Me: (pen poised) ‘Will I write “To the whole family”?’
    Parents: (shyly) ‘Yes, that would be fine.’
    Boy: (holds up one hand) ‘NO.’ (Looks from father to mother and back again, his eyebrows high. His voice goes up a few semitones.) ‘No—we agreed that Helen Garner should write each name individually .’
    Me: ‘Okay, what are the names?’
    Boy: ‘Right.’ (Takes deep breath.) ‘The names are: Ross. Julie. They’re my parents. Brady. Stuart. And Craig.’
    Me: ‘In that exact order?’
    Boy: (firmly) ‘In that exact order.’
    Me: ‘You’re Craig, right? The youngest?’
    Boy: (importantly) ‘Yes, I am.’
    I want to throw him across the back of my bike and speed away with him forever.

    A thunderstorm at dawn! Roar of rain, drops dancing on the shed roof, the pear tree leaves springing and bouncing on their twiggy branches!

    The family returns in the evening from three days at Wilsons Prom. Ted, exhausted from the long drive, dresses at once in cowboy gear, and comes through my back door in the dark with the rifle in one hand. ‘Is anybody home? Where are you, Nanny?’ He appears in the doorway of my workroom, very soft and peaceful. I sit him on my lap at the table. Long silences with the occasional remark. He has a need to dress as a cowboy. It calms something in him. I get out the photo album and we leaf through it, back and forth. He establishes a ritual response to every photo of his younger brother—a burst of unconvincing laughter.

    Peter Porter on The Book Show : ‘The purpose of form is to prevent you from putting down on the paper the first thing that comes into your head.’

    My old Montblanc shorthand pen, the kind that’s no longer made, disappears from my desk. It is my favourite fountain pen of all time. I search everywhere. Days later I have one last desolated look through the paper recycle bag beside my desk, and there it is. Calmly lying among the torn-up pages.

    At the playground with Ted and the boys from round the corner. Francis, at three, has loose blond curls and a face of such louche, wry, heavy-lidded Irishness that I can hardly look at him without laughing. I push him high on the swing. ‘Higher. Higher,’ he commands. In full flight