Did you lock the door?

I was scared rigid. My life’s inexorable linear projection was punctuated by moments of sheer terror, and no-one could say where this predilection to be terrified came from.

In the middle of nights that never ended I drew the bedclothes up so tightly I wished I could have zipped them around my face, as I’d done once with my older brother’s tartan-lined sleeping bag at a scout camp at Rowallan in the spring of 1968; an irony given that in the company of dozens of sleeping others I felt no fear at all. By day, while a scout leader chased a fear-stricken koala up a tree to the vapid amusement of his minions (an event that revealed to me the vacuous corruption of authority), from a crackling camp radio speaker crept This Guy’s in Love With You, Witchita Lineman, The Fool on the Hill, Macarthur Park; and my mind climbed into and around every piano intro, vocal inflection and orchestral upsweep, as if each note were an architectural manifestation, a building block, of some other universe where peace and fear lived in palatial brightly-lit mansions a few streets away from each other, and never visited. 

But back home fear, anthropomorphised, as if it were necessary, could smell my solitude, and came out at night for recreation and trial runs, showing an evil decayed non-face grinning a rictus guarantee of death, a rococo blackness that curled through the night air in search of something alive and sentient to strangle. Me. Hence the blankets. 

Had death already visited? Decades later, I happened to take a hearing test following an ear infection caused by swimming in a river. The audiologist informed me that the test result graph revealed a pattern indicating that a very, very loud and sudden noise, louder than almost anything else, such as a high-powered gun would make, had once occurred very close to my left ear. Anyone ever get shot in your family? he smirked, perhaps a little tactlessly. It was probably his standard line. I had no memory of anything of the sort, or even of ever being close to a gun, or of fearing guns. Nor had I ever been taken to the field. Foraging for mushrooms near Oaklands Junction was the closest the family had come to hunting, and even that had been abandoned after my mother had been ill after a meal of field mushrooms. (Mushrooms: delicious baked with chopped grilled eggplant and braised tomatoes, and topped with mozzarella.)

On those late orange-skied afternoons of childhood, haunted by death’s invisible ubiquity, I gazed down the hill of my long street watching for my father’s car to turn in like a toy in the distance, fearing his demise in some horrible motor accident. Then, when he had arrived unscathed, I stole his afternoon newspapers, and was once scarred forever by the graphic account of a mid-1960s grisly methodical knife and strangulation mass murder of women in a nurses’ home (where safer?) somewhere in America. The next year, death crossed a hemisphere - possibly through the middle of the Earth, I thought - and the son of a local hairdresser, whose salon was four hundred yards from my front gate, was murdered along with his girlfriend, as they cringed, ultimately vulnerable, in their car, another supposedly safe place. If you locked the doors.