Sunrise.

They extended the house because of more children, and kicked me into the new room. It faced east and was built over the front lawn. I imagined the grass turning brown and dying slowly beneath me while I slept. 

On those incendiary summer mornings, the sun, one thing in life you could depend on, would hoist itself above the cream brick house across the street, and smash like a ripe peach into my dark green blind, its fragments making pin-holes of light in the canvas, and throwing blurred circles like hot dancing snowflakes onto the opposite wall. 

I would jerk the blind up, drowning the pin-hole light show in a solid cube of dazzling white. Across the road, the cream brick house always looked like a square crouching animal, silhouetted until midday beneath its eave ears. 

The new bedroom absorbed the original front door. Now I used it as an exit, which I used at night with unscathed dignity - instead of clambering, novel-style, out of the sash window - on my way to anywhere, or nowhere.

*

Things happened around me, as if I were standing, dripping hallucinatory colours and typography, in the flicker of a cinema projector. Cut to next scene.

*

Now father sleeps in the sitting room. After my move, I barely noticed. Just another population redistribution. Bed in the corner: he loved television (but not that much, I half-intuited). In that room, he had had a round 1940s cigarette stand with a fake gold edge on which were perched cute little gold flutes to rest your Chesterfields; the cigarette, not the sofa. Occasionally, he would drink beers with Keith, and I would sniff and perhaps even taste my father’s; bitter with some kind of faint ancient sweetness like old autumn leaves, or a timber yard in warm sun.

Keith was a neighbour; rotund, bug eyes, always laughing at nothing. He lived across the road in the cream brick house with a slight, dark-haired woman who always wore a tennis outfit and a kind of semi-permanent tentative smile. She was shy, and they had a beautiful daughter with long brown hair, wide intelligent eyes, and soft full lips; and who later married a guitar-playing hippie.

The same summer: holidays. The road along the coast. A shop. Someone, a sister, of course; buys me an oval bath sponge with a printed face like Humpty Dumpty's. My father is not there. Up the street, a man calls, another waves. They are outside the hotel. My mother hurries. My father is dead drunk; they have poured him into a car. 

The following year, maybe two. The house shuffle continues. My father is no longer in the sitting room; he is back where he started. I barely notice. Hot February morning. I am up early; starting high school. I will catch the bus on the corner of Mary Street at twelve past eight, and it will roll and sway, overpacked with commuters and schoolchildren, to Essendon station. I’ve thrown up the blind and, across the road, the cream brick house is still in silhouette. Keith has gone now; he left his tennis bride and their daughter over a year ago, and he and his blue Volkswagen have not been seen since.