Time reframed

Francois Bon has held creative writing workshops in French prisons and schools, among other places. In his book Tous les mots sont adultes he tries to get students to start writing by delving in to their memories to create an inventory of places they have slept. Here is my inventory of places I have lived (a much simpler task than places I have slept).

The first house I don’t remember living in was a late sixties, red brick and smallish house in a middle class suburb of Sydney. One morning my mother couldn’t find me - her two year old mouse - and apparently I’d toddled over to the neighbour’s house and invited myself for tea and some squeaking. How's that for anecdotes.

Not long after that, we moved to a slightly larger, equally red brick
house about four blocks away. Summers were hotter back then and I see the years spent at this house through a veil of kleenex. That soft air of childhood, hanging out with the
neighbourhood kids and playing our own brand of games, all specially packaged just for us.

When I was seven years old my parents upgraded again to a two-storey four-bedroom,
three-bathroom house in a fancier part of the suburbs. The red brick was discarded like a rusty pair of flares for an imposing chocolate brown, spanish style house which had all the mod cons including the biggest bedroom for Pinochiette the spoilt, and a swimming pool which would become the location of a million smurf dives [Throw all your smurfs in the pool, dive in and she who collects the most smurfs wins].

This house of my dreams where I spent the greater part of my adolescence later became the house where all my nightmares are set up until this day. If, for example, I have a nightmare that someone is axing someone to death in the shower (not that I have such nightmares that often) it takes place in this house.

And then kicking and squeaking, when I was 17 years old, old enough to piss off if I didn't like it, we moved to a smaller house in a less fancy area. Gone were the spanish arches, nudey statuettes and bubbling fountains. Here everyone was a lot closer together, physically rather than emotionally.

The suburbs began to give me the plink (form of depression which stems from monotony and derives its name from the sound a tap makes when it drips against the sink in the dead of night - plink, plink, plink) and I left the wide brown land for Europe.

I travelled around Europe for an extended period of time and I was in and out of hotel rooms
my nose deeply ensconsced in Tolstoy's War and Peace. I didn't see much of all the cities I visited but I did read a lot of books.

I remember my first little home in Europe was a sagging hotel in Athens where my travelling companion and I holed up for the summer, worn out and happy, avoiding cockroaches like cracks in the pavement. And then he dropped me off in a hotel room in Patras, somewhere in Greece, and promised to be back in two days while he visited his big, Greek family. Two days became a week. I was naïve and scared of an army of boys called Nikos on vespas who wanted to have coffee with me. I spent the week hiding in my room reading all of Kundera’s books, eating cold spaghetti out of a can and popping travel sickness pills in an attempt to sleep off the week.

Of course there were so many other rooms on that trip, and I’ve travelled much more since then, but those rooms in Greece, my first lick of Europe, lurch forward in my memory, begging to be spoken about.

Back in Australia I finally escaped the suburbs and moved deep into the city with a bunch of other uni students. Apparently our particular terrace house used to be a brothel which explains the persistent late night buzzing at our door. There were four bedrooms in this house but we only actually used three of the bedrooms. One of us continued to pay rent although his room remained empty - this young poet was working up the courage to ask his strict Croatian-Australian parents if he could move there. His room became a kind of shrine to the absent. At parties, due to its open spaces, lack of light and furniture it became an alcove for lovers, a place to rest for the stragglers, while its carpet hosted the puke of a tribe of drunkards.

After the demise of the terrace house in the inner sydney - our young poet friend gave up the hope of escaping from his parents while they were still paying his way and my bank balance was less than zero - i moved back home to finish my studies. Studies completed, I left so my room could be converted into a guest room.

My room in the new flat was tiny and it had bars on the window to keep the night time ghoulies out, but it was right next to the beach. My flatmate was a theologist surfer with the noirest of humour, he knew how to twist my giggles into fully-fledged laughs. I was too timid to use the kitchen to cook or to share meals with him so I’d quickly scoff down tofu burgers on the way home so as not to disturb the pots and pans. Now I was finally a woman, living out of home and paying my way, a woman crouching in her bedroom in the dark to hide when her flatmate had guests, but a woman nevertheless. Everything was green and blue in that room and it's true that I did spend a lot of those two years underwater in the sense of what was going on in my life, but it was a pleasant sensation, like I had a breathing apparatus.

One day I got too big for my underwaterworld and I moved to another flat up the road
from the beach with a good friend. The flat was light and airy and there were no bars on the window but my bedroom was a beat for huntsman spiders. I used to find them, rather conservatively I thought, making out on my bed. I found others who were a little bit more risque fondling each other right bang in the middle of the room. Huntsman's aren't poisonous but they are fat and hairy and look like they should be poisonous.

Two years later I packed my dirt up into tiny boxes and shipped myself over to the Mother Country. In England I spent three months lolling on the floor of my friend's swish bachelor pad in East London. After three months on the floor, my newly met French boyfriend popped the question: "do you have broadband where you are now? Because if not, you should move in with me." And so I took a minor stroll on the compass and ended up in North-East London living in a mini mansion. I think the red walls of this house made all of us mad after a while. Me certainly, French undoubtedly and even Derick, our hibernating, canadian flatmate. I love red walls but I wouldn't do that kind of thing again.

When we moved to Paris I wanted to live in Belleville, on the east side, like in London, where there’s music and there’s people who are young and alive. But French found an apartment on the conservative west side. After a year the blonde wood floors of the apartment were covered with dark hairs, both his and mine. Our hair was falling out from the stress of the bloodied words which passed between us.

So one fine day several Junes ago, I took 16 metro trips (aller-retour) and carried all my possessions to the flat on the hill in the 18th arrondissement in Paris where I bask now, a slice of the sea in the city.

Two very obvious things that were prominent for me when doing this exercise: I've had the good fortune to never be homeless and the memories of the places in my life are invariably connected to the people who have passed through those places.