Consolation of Clouds

In the quiet years between my father’s death and my stepfather’s eruption into our lives, my mother, my sister, and I lived with my grandparents for the longest time in the last of the houses that look like that. You know, little and squat, red brick with a red-tiled roof and a wooden sunroom-cum-sleepout propped against the back wall and, all about, when you spread your arms and spin, red roses and metal-blue hydrangeas and pumpkins on hairy stalks and a red incinerator made of tin and fruit trees shining with apples and oranges and loquats with big pips.

My grandfather built me a cubbyhouse near the raspberry patch, and I kept his many empty whisky bottles there, filled with pretty-coloured water and seaweed, for my experiments.

No one had a job. The accounts spike on the kitchen bar was crammed with unpaid bills until my mother and grandmother decided to cook not just for us, but for the well-to-do. We hung wet towels in the doorways to cool the kitchen. We pulled the legs off crayfish; we baked hundreds of pale pink pavlovas, which we topped with whipped cream and passionfruit; we filled plastic buckets with slippery tuna mornay and stored them in the laundry.

Mrs Collins, who was old, with long silver hair I was allowed to brush on special occasions, came to help with the dishes. I went to her greengrocer shop most days after school and sat in the window shelling peas. Mr Collins would pull himself along past the boxes of carrots and silver beet, grasping the wooden shop counter with both hands.