Born in Newcastle

Looks like my boyfriend and I are finished. I haven't heard from him since Monday.

The house I was carried into after being born in Newcastle hospital was at Warners Bay on Lake Macquarie which is half an hours' drive south of Newcastle on good, asphalted, suburban roads that wind, rise and fall over and around semi-populated, eucalyptus covered hills, through leafy stretches of modest houses on the main road and side roads, and unpretentious shopping strips.
The house being built by Dad never really got finished. Inside cladding of walls had never happened. The dark splintery wood of upright beams joined other beams below a roof of tin sheets. The ceiling was non existent.
We moved to Merewether some years later, and into a run-down weatherboard house two kilometres from the beach. Merewether is an innner suburb of Newcastle.
The first memory I have of living at the Warner's bay house was of me being by myself under the house which was propped up high at the front by grey, spintery posts over ground which sloped down to a quiet road.
The steps to our front door off a patio ran up next to where I sat spinning an upside down bicycle wheel. Dad came home and went up the steps without speaking to me.
He did see me though, because then Mum called me from the back of the house. I clambered out the side and to the back door where I was taken into the kitchen for a shameful little talk about the wrongfulness of having my hand down my pants.
My second memory of that time was being with a group of kids, neighbors mainly of about four or five years old. We were seated in a circle in a back shed situated midst stubbly grass tufts and eucalypts up the hill along a broken path from our back door.
The game I wanted to play 'rudies' meant taking our pants off and touching each other. The kids at first hesitated, as if giving it some thought, then seemed to bolt gradually, out of the shed leaving me alone with a feeling akin to, if I'd known, humiliation. It is now my belief that long before that time a rough grown-up thumb and finger aroused and confused my mind and body by touching its secret places, and the fleeting image of this happening and the sensation of repugnance combined with arousal re-visits my inner eye occasionally.
Mum had a 'nervous breakdown' when Stephen was born. She stayed in bed for a long time. I attended kindy at the local school. Then we moved and I went to school near Merewether.
Once or twice I was invited to birthday parties over the years by friends at the Merewether school. One party was in a beautiful house with beautiful people and beautiful food. Before the party I tried filling a half empty perfume bottle up with water because I didn't have a gift to give, but it went cloudy. The other party I was invited to was completely forgotten about. The expression on the face of the girl who invited me creased with hurt on the next Monday as she asked me why I hadn't come to her party on Saturday.
I don't remember being invited to any other parties, though I did have other friends. One friend tap danced. She demonstrated in front of the class once and she had taught me the steps so I could join her but I forgot them half way through so just stood with hands on hips and tapping my foot while she finished her routine. We would walk home together the long way which was past her house, then I would go on to my house two blocks away. Sometimes I would be invited in to eat cakes at her house.
One day her mother was crying because she had grabbed a hot cake pan accidently when the tea towel fell away while taking it out of the oven. I stared at her with something like cold curiosity and when she glanced at me I felt the naked hostility of her thoughts toward me.
That stare was possibly justified as I believe the trait of aggressive negativity had already become established in me. I'm ashamed of admitting that I may have enjoyed seeing her suffer. Once I was stung by a bee in their yard. That Mum kindly pulled out the sting and applied a blue liquid to my hurting foot.
Sometimes I'd walk the quicker way home with a girl one grade below me who lived two doors down. We had to pass a lot of houses with gardens behind wire fences and grass up against them, then the footpath, more grass then the road. On the grass next to the fence of the last house before a pub on a corner we would often squat with our pants down, pretending to search our ports but doing a wee wee. We didn't care if the road was busy or people came in and out of the pub. Nobody noticed us.
On the way to school in the mornings I would often find an empty cigarette packet in the gutter outside that pub. I'd take out the silver or gold paper and discard the box then look for the most beautiful rose that I could find. I liked them full blown and large. I'd reach over a fence of one of the lovely gardens on that street, break the rose off and wrap the stem in my cigarette box paper to make a corsage for my teacher.
At school I'd put it on her desk along with twenty other corsages brought in by the other girls. She always chose a bud. She never chose my corsage.
Once I found a dead baby bird in the gutter on the way to school, and thinking the teacher would be pleased with me because I had discovered an interesting science object, I searched for an empty cigarette box. I put the dead baby bird in it. At school I stood in front of my teacher with other girls around to watch her delighted interest as she flipped the lid of the cigarette box. But she kind of jumped back, turning her head away, handing it back to me in disgust and shock. My dismay and sad feeling of rejection went unnoticed. I often wanted desperately to please my teachers but somehow never managed it.
In that school the boys were segregated from the girls. I was in the 'A' glass of girls, and a snob because I was smart. I always achieved A's in my report. Once my Mother was given the opportunity to send me to a special school because I was bright yet underprivileged. She couldn't get past the fact that the school was five suburbs away and she didn't know how I would get there. I wasn't allowed to go.
We lived in a run-down, single-storey, weatherboard house of rotting floorboards beneath old carpet and a rusted tin roof. The place sagged, like my friend house two doors down. Both houses needed painting, or pulling down, which they were a long time later. My bedroom window opened onto a narrow side path where fushias, geraniums and lilies of white with one yellow stamen grew close to the house in shadow of the old lady's house and wooden fence between us and her next door. I ran away as far as the front gate once by climbing out of my low, wooden, sash window. I wanted to find my real family; someplace where I would be loved. I didn't know where to go though, so didn't go.
The blank front of our house had no verandah, just three steps to a double front door that nobody used, except for when all the relatives sneaked in for Mum's 50th surprise party.
That day we were yelled at to get the washing folded and off the couch, by Dad. The side path came past my window and around to a back verandah and back door which everyone used. There was a solid door, usually left open, and a half screen door. The screen wire was wrecked and in tatters. Both doors together opened onto the kitchen; a large room painted green and yellow and covered in fly spots. The swarm of flys in there provided sport for my older brother and his friends who chased and squashed them using rolled up newspaper or plastic fly swats. I have always been sickened by the sight of squashed flys, or any insect.