The erratic idea was, of course, crushed by the time I hit eleven. It was smashed with a blatant vigour that I couldn’t be cared to explain about. The dream wasn’t the first that would be subject to my reckless undoing, though. In the years that followed, my ideas and passions were hidden, abused, mocked and eventually disintegrated. There were, surprisingly, one or two that survived, however. The important ones, anyway. One of the supposed-important ideas that lived was the language. I remained subject to my tattered Larousse Pocket Dictionary: French-English where I would regularly rip it from my pocket simply to riff through pages of alien lettering. It was a strange pastime for an eleven year old in the dirt of Australia. A pastime that would eventually become an obsession. Or, more like, a distraction.
I wasn’t a strange child, not by a long shot. Not until my mother left, anyway. I was two when that happened and I don’t remember it. From two years old, I didn’t have much of a chance. I mean, I was refused at the local school. Kicked out at a mere age of ten. From then on, I obtained my education through what adults called, ‘distant learning’. I didn’t agree with the title. The woman who spoke to me over the two way radio every week was bored and lazy, and I pictured her fat. She cared very little about my work and it was perhaps all her fault that I grew up without knowing my times tables.
I wasn’t dumb though. No, I was very intelligent, or at least I liked to tell myself so. The whereabouts of their origin always remained unclear, but in the musty front room, baked in the Australian heat, lived a throng of books. They were novels, mostly. Some were in different languages, but most I understood. They lay, scattered on the ancient coffee tables, balanced on the dusty couch. There was a bookshelf, of course. Or at least there had been at one stage, but now it seemed that it was so covered with its inhabitants, that it remained unsighted from human eyes. I couldn’t count past fifty, but at eleven, I managed to count fifty three times before becoming confused and quitting my endeavour. On one of my dad’s rare good days, he estimated (roughly, of course) nine hundred books.
It was almost obvious that I would love them from the beginning. I mean, we had no money; or at least no money for frivolous activities that would grasp my attention for hours, such as the toys advertised on the radio promised. I read my first real novel, Oliver Twist, when I was seven, and despite my lack of understanding and broken English, I adored it. From that day, I read novels all the time. I rarely understood them, not until The Wolves of Willoughby Chase entered my nine year old life.
It was easy from then on to admit that books were an enormous part of my obtuse life. They were, actually, the biggest part of my life. Apart from the garage, of course.
Oh, the garage. No, we mustn’t forget the garage.
The garage was the holder of every secret myself or my father ever possessed. The garage was the recess in my mind that held my biggest fears and my most carefree thoughts. The garage held me when I needed it and it provided distraction when I wanted it most. The garage introduced me to everyone I knew and it let me lie on its roof on starless nights. The garage listened to my strangled conversations in French and it housed many of my forgotten books overnight. The garage was the place I ran to when I was upset and the garage hid me when I was being pursued. Oh yes. My garage hid me. It hid me all the time.
The garage was the biggest part of my innocent life when I was nine. Actually, it was the biggest part of my life at sixteen. But my story doesn’t start at the cultivated age of nine, and it certainly doesn’t start in the depths of sophistication that was sixteen. No, I was but an unborn child when it began.
The story I remember started over sixteen years ago.
I remember it like a scar.
~
I think I was born with a tan. Either that, or as a baby, I slept in the hammering sun of the desert. As I grew into a lively six year old with large brown eyes and knots in her hair, my skin developed a colour, that, quite honestly, gave the natives a run for their money.
My facial features, were, as my discriminative father thanked God for, were rather typically Australian and did not make me look like ‘one of the damned indigenous peoples’.
My hair was chopped under my chin and gave me an almost boyish look. The reason for this was the knots. My hair grew terribly fast, as we’d learnt at an early age, and my father had taken out a thick pair of scissors on night and chopped my hair off.
At the time, I had cried and hidden the dead hair in an old box in the back of my cupboard. But that was before I acquired a pair of my own dainty sewing scissors and discovered the joyous world of being one’s own hairdresser.
At six years old, I was a gangly child who had the look of starvation around her. I ate, of course. I ate what my father ate, mostly. Rabbit stew, sausages and occasionally a salad from the corner store. That wasn’t to mention the junk that was dropped off at the garage every now and then. Cornchips were a personal favourite until, at eight years old, I gained a tiresome fever the day of eating some, which resulted in a distinct dislike towards the food ever after. I sat all day, most every day at the garage with my father. He fixed cars, mostly, and I thought he was amazing for it. It was almost ten years later, at sixteen, that I finally admitted to myself that he wasn’t really as good as he wrote himself out to be. At sixteen, I realized my father was all but a conman when it came to fixing cars. He loved it of course. He loved the grease and the grime, as I did. But he couldn’t do it well. At six, though, I didn’t know that. At six, my father was a superhero.
~
I met Lou Fernette when I was nine at school and I hated her, square, from the first moment I saw her pink frilly shirt underneath her spotless white overalls. She hated me too, after I accidently got grease on her pristine outfit and she flounced off to her friends, leaving me to mutter mean things under my breath. Swearing to get back at her in the coarsest way.
I never did get back at her though. My father laughed at me gently when I told him the day’s occurrence that afternoon and told me that a little hate was healthy and not to mind Lou. I listened to him, of course, but even my father’s words could not sway the burning rage that filled me when I saw the soft waves of Lou’s blonde hair and the baby pink laces of her runners. Lou’s mother, Marie was on the school board and she was worse than Lou herself. She wore black, mostly, and her vehemently pursed mouth was usually shaded the colour of the brightest sunset. She was manipulative and she was cruel and it was her who enforced my expulsion from school, the day I gave Lou a haircut.
It hadn’t started out badly. We’d been on rather good terms, actually, all week. We had decided to seal our agreement by cutting each other’s hair. Lou had delicately snipped off a tangled curl of my own, and gleefully, I had taken out a chunk from the very crown of Lou’s head, leaving her half bald.
That’s what kicked me out of school, and, back to square one, Lou and I hated each other vigorously from that day forward.
Lou, her mother and her father, whom I had never laid eyes on, never came to the garage, and after being kicked out of school, I had no reason to ever think of her again. Of course I got curious. Adolescence tended to spark an unimportant curiosity in me. But I was, at the time, thirteen and I had neither way nor inducement to trail my footsteps back to grade four.
I had enough to occupy my time, though. I mean; I had my books. I had my father, whom I adored.
And I had the garage. My gosh, I had the garage.
really your really good at writing, you should continue. What could go wrong... there is never any harm from trying.
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