John Kinsella

Your mate's father says you should start investing in bricks and mortar as soon as you can. Houses don't generally mean that much to you, but this place is special. It's the old Geraldton hospital, now owned by the Education Department, rented out to visiting teachers for a song. It's always offered to the headmaster first, but then it's up for grabs. Mum's had her eye on it for a year and you're really excited when she gets the word. It's on a half-acre opposite the prison. It's got verandahs on three sides and has a ballroom. There are six bedrooms. The kitchen could seat twenty, maybe thirty. It backs onto a vacant block that's surrounded on all sides. No one will be building it out in the foreseeable future. Years later, going back to visit a friend—the poet Anthony Lawrence who is living in Geraldton—you find the house gone and the whole area consumed by a car park and shopping centre. You reconstruct it from memory, a few photographs—to get the whole picture, two prints have to be placed side by side—and conversation. But it's more than that, it's your body—the veins, the organs. It's alive. You work against the materiality of recollection and come up with a house. Thick with ghosts, it ghosts itself into your present. It shadows you. It was one of the great homes of Geraldton. You saw a shadow race down the corridor. You watched a door handle turn slowly back and forth by itself; you crawled through the tunnels beneath the house and hid caches of chemicals after a huge explosion ripped a funeral sign apart in the vacant block and rocked the town. 

The limestone foundations were crumbling and the red brick bled when the tail of a cyclone dumped heavy rain on the town. Something else inhabited that house, you were sure about that. 

The explosion was heard over six miles away according to the paper. Of course, the reporters didn't know where the epicentre was, but they said it was loud in the centre of town and registered at the fertiliser factory out towards Bluff Point. Maybe it was a friend who mentioned the fertiliser factory, and the paper Bluff Point. Whatever. Your mother dug her fingers deep into the arm of a pregnant neighbour; the guys next door in the drug and alcohol rehab centre thought it was a mortar. The girl who lived by the vacant block, where flying through the air with the force of the explosion as shrapnel ripped into the ground you considered that time is relative—a second is an hour and the moment of death stretches infinitely in all directions—would tell you a couple of years down the track that her family talked about sticks of gelignite. You corresponded with her, a Young Writer's winner, like your now wife. Bits of the letters buried in archives somewhere. From the city you sent an invitation to Beethoven's 1st Symphony at the Perth Concert Hall and she wondered why; though she did turn up. Later drunk on a beach by the Geraldton lighthouse, making jokes about Freud, you picked a smashed champagne flute out of food, trying to remake it. Her novel in the second person about a Dylanesque minstrel wandering the back roads of Australia was in the house for years—and then a letter came asking for it back. You don't know where it is now. You wanted sex and she wanted to talk about it. You wear pink hats two years later and attract the abuse of boys in panel vans.

Shooting an air rifle in the back garden, you lost your temper as a mate targeted neighbours throwing tomatoes and broke every male code around, frothing at the mouth. His hatred became pathological, reinforced by you watching his seasickness as a boat twenty miles out at Africa Reef plunged deeply in three-metre swells and at risk of breaking up forced its way back. Smashing your Mother's car up at a party and vomiting over the windscreen, you waited as he joined the Special Air Service and became a sharp shooter. He protected the Pope as your wife in her habit kissed his hand and synchronicity bored deep deep, calibre of the rifle you slaughtered rabbits and birds with on the farm, the rifle your father used for shooting the litter of dogs.

The tunnels under the house were a retreat and you hid toxic chemicals down there and hoped you'd get trapped. The skin cells of the dying would fall from hospital beds and you were breathing their dust. The limestone and floorboards breathed and you became part of them. The carpets over the floorboards crackled with crystals of explosive that erupted with contact—the bottom blown out of a filter paper as it dried. You're so paranoid you won't use the name of the compound nor mention the process of making it/them. Later, at the uni bus stop, a kid from Geraldton will run into you and ask for your "explosives book". He has decided to become a revolutionary and threatens violence if you don't hand it over. He's living with an old woman in a wealthy area and has heard god speak at that very bus stop. You go home and destroy the book. You protest against nuclear weapons and protests against US warships in Fremantle Harbour.

Behind the house a cop gets shot by a girl that your mother teaches at school. At the time you're angry with her though you feel something for her and you can't say it. At school you're on the run and the sports teacher watches as some guy smashes your head into the asphalt. "Smashes" was the word for violence then and the head biology teacher who picked his nose who was nowhere around when the violence took place wrote the chapter on genetics in the core biology textbook for senior school kids, The Web of Life. Tom, whom you can mention by name, got or maybe gets arrested climbing the walls of Boans department store and reciting from Hamlet. He'll fail his tertiary entrance examination gloriously. You drink cooking sherry on the quiet at home, and Cointreau and Southern Comfort at a friend's house. He's the friend whose father navigates the boat out of potential disaster, when your ex-friend vomits green shit over the side as the wooden hull thumps into wall on wall of water. If it turns side-on we're fucked, someone says. You like the feeling. It's like being on the edge of a cliff. You drink with him and he tells you what it's like being Jewish in Geraldton. You want to become a Jew because he's so isolated. He eats non-kosher foods when his parents are away. You listen to Pink Floyd with him and he smashes up his father's car. And his brother's. He's wild but will settle down and follow his father's profession. You lose him and he loses you. You become interested in the cabalistic arts.

Years before at Wollaston College you go for retreat before confirmation into the Anglican Church. A light pierces the stained glass and you've suddenly got a vocation. It's the sun getting low in the sky and if you know it you ignore the science. It's enough, and years later it will strike again in the abbey grounds at Walsingham. You've become entirely ecumenical by then. Your friend who will drown himself was or is an altar boy. He's being fondled in the vestry. He hates that he likes it. He hates the guy who does it—there's no indecision here. Hatred is pure, but you don't feel any hate. Just anger. You both march against parliament house. He hopes to make it in theatre. He gets a minor part in Uncle Vanya when you both go down to the city.

It's Back Beach and the school has managed to force you into doing sport. You don't mind so much because you live up the hill from Back Beach now and they'll let you go straight home at the end of the lesson. The beach is okay. Some guy—a big guy who talks about wanking himself off in the shower and perving on his sister—gets caught in a rip. You're nearby and have often been in rips, letting them drag you a mile out and swimming back. You swim every day. The water will take you and that's okay. You want it to happen. You go out after him and grab him round the neck and drag him back. He says things you'll never repeat, because you'd take something from him that would kill him. Emerging from the water, with him coughing his guts out, you're met by the sports teacher who's been in 'Nam and hates you, because your mother could keep studying classics when they were at uni together and his number came up, like—almost like—the John Forbes poem. In a tangential way. You're living in three different times writing this—the text is becoming itself. Its rhizomes are spreading further and further. The teacher is there with the big boys, the boys who've got hair on their chests. They don't say much. These are guys who'll crawl through the drainage pipes under the new housing development as long as no one mentions it at school. They've almost got their licences and have had a "fuck". Your "life-saving" will never be spoken of, and you fall backwards into the surf, kicking and kicking until you're back out near where the rips start. 

___
"Familiar Territory: Changes of Tense"
a continuing autobiography series by John Kinsella
TCR September 1999 Feature