Often at night I fall asleep to the sound of my mother playing the guitar in the tiny entrance hall of our apartment.  The light and the sound of her laughter filters under the door.  I know, without being in the room, that a throng of young men in Hush Puppies sit enraptured at her feet.  She's that kind of person.  Whenever I am in the same room as my mother it seems as if the world is brighter, warmer, more interesting.  She is my whole world and when I look at her, I see angel wings.  

The things I understand about my life this summer are as follows.  My father doesn’t live with us anymore and my mother is not a morning person.  I can tell this by the way she stomps around the flat when she gets ready for work.  I traipse behind her enthralled as she prepares for the day, or I stand behind her in wonder as she spits into a tube of black eyeliner to moisten it before she paints on eyebrows and eyelashes.  Her own are pale; her hair is ginger.  When she’s finished, she steps back as if to view a masterpiece.  Finally, she puckers her lips for a flourish of pale pink lipstick before she sits on the toilet to pull up her stockings.  

My mother is always in a rush at this time of the morning and seems irritated by the cornflakes she plonks into our breakfast bowl and sometimes it seems, she is irritated by us – my younger brother Bruce and me.  

She works as a typist in paint factory somewhere in the city and studies at a place called The Org close by our apartment every single weekend and every single night of the week.  If she can’t find a maid to look after us the job falls to me.  Sometimes Nannan, my great grandmother is called into service.  Her hair is silver, her eyes the colour of clouds and she sits by the window staring over the petrol station beneath us into the traffic that rushes down Claim Street.  Bruce and I sit side by side on the bed and watch as her toothless gums move around in her mouth like a cow chewing cud in a field.

I learn later that The Org is a pseudonym for Scientology.  I can’t pronounce the word and my mother tries to explain it to me by showing me the book she is always reading.  It is called Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health.  It has a picture of a Volcano on the cover which will later become an apt metaphor for our lives.  “It’s a science of the mind darling” she says, and her face lights up.  I can’t read so I stare at the picture and take her word for it.

Occasionally my father visits to take us on an outing.  While my mother dresses us, he stands in the doorway, a tall, lean man in a blue sweater wearing the look of a man who is trying to stay relevant.  He takes us to the Cuban Hat Roadhouse at the bottom of Nugget Hill where African waiters bring us milkshakes on silver trays which they clip into the rolled down windows.  In the back seat in the dark, I watch my father's head as he turns to Bruce to help him with his food.  He has an angular profile and an earnest look as he wipes away the mess Bruce has made of himself.  In the pit of my stomach, even at five, I have a sense, that my father is a man who will always be marginal.  Even though I don't know much, I know he has slipped away from us.  I vomit strawberry milkshake all over the place.

*

For the time being, my father lives close by.  He rents a room in a single man's quarters on Abel Road.  We live on the corner of Claim and Hancock.  Claim and Abel.

In the dusty inner city where we live, my mother is finding herself.  The Org, the friends she makes there, are the only things outside cigarettes, folk songs and fake costume jewellery that she seems to care about.  The flat is full of Scientologists every night when the Org closes which makes it hard to sleep.  Sometimes we sleep on the hard benches at The Troubadour Folk Club across the railway tracks where we live.  Every night there is smoke, saxophones and my mother's guitar.  They are a scruffy, bearded, blue jeaned lot.  I am to grow up underpinned by rebellion and music.  I don't know yet that I am also to grow an experiment.

*

It is dark when I wake.  On the chair next to my bed I find a pair of polished brown shoes, white ankle socks, a starched green gingham Roseneath school uniform, a brown felt hat with a matching blazer. A small brown cardboard suitcase sits next to the bed.  I open it quietly and find inside an empty lunch tin and a juice bottle.  Everything is neat, organised and ready for me to be launched into the world.  I am beyond excited.  I cannot wait for sharpened pencils and books covered in brown paper and plastic with a label announcing my name.  I have lived and breathed for this moment. 

I sneak out of bed and dress quickly. Wearing the blazer and hat, with the suitcase neatly positioned next to my chair, I force myself to stay awake and will the hours to pass.  I dream of big things.  I want to read and write like mom.  I want to sit at a desk and shine like a star.  I want to know everything there is to know in the world but most of all I want to meet other children.  As the light in the room changes my mother appears and gropes her way to the bathroom.  I stir.

"Jesus Christ! Keryn”, she clutches her heart “what the hell do you think you're doing?  You nearly gave me a fucking heart attack."  

"I'm waiting to go to school."

"Get the hell out of those clothes and get back to bed immediately it’s the middle of the night!”

I dream about school.  I long for school.  I long for shiny new books and the smell of chalk and leather.  

I am not to know at five, that dreams, like bubbles, are fragile things. They depend on light and air, and, sometimes like bubbles, dreams can burst or simply disappear.