Hockney ripples on a bathroom wall.

I left the room quietly - probably for the last time; its lonely sunrise mural gazing down on the room’s first utter emptiness, save for some kind of eighties carpeting, since the house was built in the sunshiny days of optimistic postwar Melbourne, when steamrollers roamed the bare streets, their sibilant screams heard from afar as they subjugated hot tar over a recalcitrant basalt plain turning it inch by inch into yet another suburb.

I shut the door and moved on to the next room. This would be harder. Clearing my own once-bedroom, although long occupied by others, held a dilution of fascination for a personal past, a lost but remembered history, a shrine of memories; but mine alone, so no need of any sentimentality.

The bathroom was different. My eyes stripped away the inert detritus and saw my father, silent in front of the mirrored cabinet door, spring morning light scintillating through two textured glass windows and projecting on pale blue walls and ceiling like the surface of a Hockney pool. The image summoned a faint remembered fragrance of spring morning christened with steam; a still-cool breeze sending morning sun-awakened acridity from a geranium shrubbery, to mix with the sweet spiciness of aftershave on skin that would live another twenty-two years. Goodbye Dad, have a nice day, and his car suddenly hums, and the sound disappears as I take a lunchbox out of the fridge, and I walk the lonely empty street into the future, and school. 

My eyes having stripped away the mess, brought it back and the image was subsumed beneath  decades of mismatched tiling repairs; a 1980s aluminium-framed slide window that replaced the frosted glass of Hockneyesque filtration magic; a shower curtain of water-stained toucans; and an ocean of lipsticks. Hundreds. Lining the windowsill, spilling over onto the various random horizontal bathroom surfaces, little cylinders of imitation brass, and squared-off plastic, and a few of the early type that gave you a slide-up button so you could single-handedly thumb your lipstick up into position for a surreptitious touch-up while your other hand held your patiently smouldering Stuyvesant. This wreckage, when she was still alive, held a kind of tragi-comical allure, like the dressing room of a fading silent film star who still came to the studio every day. And of course, she still used them, and indeed was still an artiste, describing a perfect line upper and lower.

But now, the tragi-comedy was just a sea of memories and dead smiles. The half-used cylinders of red and rose and brown and pinkish orange lay like expended cartridges never to be touched again. It was the hardest rubbish I’ve ever thrown out.