Second Extract

Pre-school and other occurrences during the PreEnlightenment, Heuristic-Reliant and Superstitious Age of Partial Bipedalism and Preliteracy

So now that we’re done with Christmas, let’s return to the digressive narrative of my life, starting with pre-school.

Pre-school was possibly an interesting time of my life. How the fuck am I meant to know, really? I remember bits and pieces, interesting snippets, moments. I know that I would have done innumerable things but I don’t remember it with much precision. Nevertheless, nihilism is boring, so I can and will tell you some stuff.  

I went to a pre-school very near our house – in fact, only about 250 metres away, just past the end of our street, across the road and forward about 30 metres. It was called Fox Valley Kindergarten, and it still exists in the same spot today. It was a nice kindergarten, I think, with a small but perfectly varied playground which included a big wooden play area  at the top of the slope, a sandpit, a swingset and some open space on artificial grass for dancing or hula hooping or whatever the fuck little infants do with each other. In this period of my life, I very much had a “best friend”, another blonde boy probably with skin a little more tanned and a shorter height than me (I think) whose name was Dylan Paige. I don’t know how we came to be “best friends”, I certainly don’t remember the first time we met, I don’t know what things we talked about, if anything (do three/four year-olds even talk to each other about things or do they pretty much just make noises?), but I do seem to remember that we were pretty much inseparable on the playground. I am not sure whether this is accurate but I certainly have the impression that, every morning, as soon as we got to the pre-school, we would hop onto the swings and begin oscillating back and forth with big grins on our faces, laughing and shouting. I have one image in my head of us doing this, and I’m fairly sure it’s in the morning. However, like so much that has been said in this autobiography hitherto, it is uncertain.

I think I only have one other distinct pre-school memory set in the playground and, fortunately (for your sakes, you dopey cunts with tiny attention spans), this one doesn’t involve Dylan. Instead, this one involves a boy who would later attend Warrawee Public School with me, called Alex Jarmyn. In it, I am at the top of the playground, past the wooden play area, just in front of the big fence which separates the pre-school from the big dusty area next to it. I am standing on some woodchips, I think. A boy (Alex) is coming towards me. His face is freckly, he is taller than me (I think).  

“I’m four,” he says. “How old are you?”

“Three,” I say.

And that’s where the memory ends. Ok, so it’s a little banal but I find it fascinating. I would. I’m a huge narcissist and I’m totally self-centred.

I do remember a fair bit about what went on inside the pre-school’s only building. I remember we had nap times, and that they were truly dreadful. I think it’s easy to forget the horror of the pure, black dread that a child feels when told to do something that they don’t want to do – but it is real. I remember also that our main teacher (at least, I think she was our main teacher) used to teach us songs like Frère Jacques and made us point to parts of our body and call them funny names (only years later, when I saw the words tête and main and jambe and bras, did I suddenly realise that I had been taught French all those years ago[1]). I used to find what we did with this woman really hard, I think, but it seems in retrospect that she might have been a very ambitious pre-school teacher and I can only admire that. I remember, too, that we did a lot of art in pre-school (a fact which I imagine is utterly commonplace). I have one very particular memory of decorating the large square of fabric that my dad used to use to cover his bedside table. This is how I recall it in my mind:

I am sitting on one side of the classroom, surrounded by other infants sitting down, and drawing, probably on a piece of scrap paper, images that could be used for their tablecloth designs. The area around me seems crowded, perhaps filled with materials and drawings. Perhaps I am stumped on ideas for my own tablecloth, struggling for inspiration. Suddenly, a burst of creative energy sees me beginning to draw some sort of machine-vehicle-robot-thing. It has red wheels, each with one spoke, that are attached to red sticks that lead up to a red square with two little futuristic blue wings (or perhaps they might better be called unknowable “design elements”) on either side of it, and inside it, as if it is a movie screen or something, there is this weird green creature whose body consists of a circular head, an insectile abdomen, two stick legs protruding from the bottom of its head and some sort of cloudlike item on its head, either another body part or a hat.

Here it gets a bit hazy. After completing this drawing, I possibly put my hand up to signal to Mrs Laurie that I have come up with a design or else she comes over of her own accord. Either way, she looks at the design, I explain it in some fashion and she deems it adequate to imprint on the actual tablecloth.

I don’t know where the fuck this design comes from – what sort of subconscious machinations inspired it – but I know I described it with near-perfect accuracy just then because I am staring at the tablecloth now. Apart from this one bizarre, inexplicable machine-thing, which sits lugubriously in one corner of the cloth, there are eleven other weird texta drawings scattered around the cloth (three on each side), as well as these weird little floating creatures which I remember were intended to fill up space and were meant to look identical to each other (though they are so fucking far from identical it's rather funny). In case you want to know what some of the other big drawings look like, what follows is a description of some of them:

The drawing a few centimetres away from the machine-thing, in the middle of that side of the cloth, is of a green person with green dots for eyes, a flat green mouth, no ears, strangely straight and thick long green hair (length of hair presumably signifying female gender), an armless green torso with blue button-like dots traversing it diagonally, and two green stick legs with green stick feet. This person is inside some 2-D red cave-like structure (probably reflecting my interest in cavemen and the show about cavemen called The Gogs), with red stegosaurus-like spines along the top and side of it (which I think are meant to be rocks) and weird blue circle-like things inside it, above the person.

The next drawing along, in the other corner of that side of the cloth, is presumably of some sort of family, possibly my own. On the top left is some half-red, half-blue stick figure of the same basic design as the one in the cave but with stick arms this time, plus weirdly elongated dots for eyes on a small, bald head. These latter design features which make him (I say “him” because the baldness suggests it’s meant to be the dad) look a little like one of the Canadians from South Park. Next to him is a blue figure I am inferring is probably a female. She has an even smaller head and looks kind of sad in her squished-up face. Her hair is short and possibly a bit like my mum’s at that time. Below these two parents are three other smaller figures that I fear might be meant to look like children.  The one on the far left has a blue torso, green stick legs, green stick arms and a red head without any face. The one in the middle is kind of faded but it seems to be some sort of green vaguely ranine thing with one stick arm. Perhaps it is meant to be Barry, our very old black cat; that would be my best bet.[2] The figure on the right is all in blue and has the most interesting hairstyle of any of the figures described yet, with both a couple of spiky strands as well as some flat ones. Perhaps this is meant to be me. Who can tell?

The next drawing, in the middle of another side of the tablecloth, is possibly the most fascinating, due to what I think is a rather macabre subject matter. A blue stick figure with two rather weird strands of hair extending outwards from each side of its head and red arms with flames or orbs of blood on the end of them stands in what I think might be a cave (reflecting the Palaeolithic theme). Strewn in front of the cave are rows of blue (attempted) circles, each containing a single blue dot. Although I am not sure, I suspect these simulacra of dotted circles are meant to be skulls and therefore that the figure is meant to be some sort of barbaric, bloodthirsty caveman. That would definitely be my style.

I suppose I will spare you descriptions of the other eight drawings. Suffice it to say that they are just as exquisitely drawn but that they change up the themes a little, even introducing some floral notes (I was a complex individual).

I really love this tablecloth, and I also feel it’s a very good memento, particularly considering that it tells me the date it was made: namely, 2001. I would have been four for most of 2001, of course, and 2001 was also significant for being the year before I began primary school. Indeed, the tablecloth, being a rather significant project, may have been the last thing I ever made in pre-school. That would seem to make sense. Perhaps that’s why I remember making it.

I have one another memory of an event that happened inside the pre-school building, and it is probably even more interesting than the one before. You know how they say that all little infants are basically solipsists? That they are oblivious to the existence of others and only ever think about the suffering inflicted on them? Well, I am by no means sure, but I think this moment that I am about to describe may have represented the first time I felt real empathy. Here’s how the memory plays out in my mind:

I am sitting down on what I think is green carpet, surrounded by other pre-schoolers.  Up in front of us is our teacher. She almost seems to be on some sort of platform but she is probably just sitting on a chair. She is talking about the dangers of sliding on carpets, warning us not to perform the action and soberly informing us of the possible consequences, the potential for carpet burn. “Come here, Daniel,” she says (or something to that effect) “Show the class what happens if you slide on the carpet.” Daniel hobbles forward and pulls up one trouser leg so that his bloody knee is exposed. It is a grisly sight: bloody and wet and oh so painful. Daniel winces and I wince with him. I shall never slide on the carpet, I tell myself, I shall never.

And that’s the memory.  

I remember only one other ‘event’ pertaining to life in pre-school: the birthday party of this very Daniel. I think I was actually pretty good friends with him in pre-school so it’s no surprise to me that I was invited to his party. Unfortunately, I don’t remember anything about him, really – I don’t remember how he behaved, what his voice was like, what he said his interests were (it’s basically the same with Dylan, too, I think) – but I do know that he was of Asian ethnicity. I also have a vague picture in my mind of how he looked when I knew him then, although I’m 95% sure I wouldn’t recognise him now, as an adult, if perchance I bumped into him on the street. For all I know I could have bumped into him on the street recently. He might have walked past me at Sydney Uni. The repeating refrain: who can know?

I suspect I might remember this birthday because it was the first real kid’s party I had ever attended, but it may not have even been that. In any case, there are two scenes in my mind which I think come from the same day. The first was being in front of one of the passenger doors of their white four-wheel-drive and having to take a really big step just to reach the rubber platform from which you could enter the car, and thinking, probably before and after this, about how my dad disapproved of people who bought four-wheel-drives. The second was being in their house and looking at all the wonderful, exciting range of junkfood arrayed on the table (a bowl of Cheezels being one image in particular that remains in my mind), but being told that I, along with everyone else, must wash my hands before eating it. I remember thinking this demand was rather odd, and at an age where my worldview was constructed by me parents, in whom I also had absolute faith and trust, I thought that it must be stupid or anal[3] for his parents to insist on kids washing their hands before eating if mine did not.

Anyway, that’s it: that’s all I remember of pre-school and my friends there. Was that interesting? Probably not. But who cares? I feel only contempt for you. This book is not for you; it’s for me. Your only purpose is to fawn and hold your mouth agape in stuporous awe and slavish admiration of my fearsome intellect and literary brilliance. If you dare voice dissent, if you dare question my authority, you might as well not be reading this book. I am in control. I am your leader, your dictator. You are obedient, passive, submissive, obsequious. If I really believed that there were many other people with even the slightest degree of intelligence or insight into anything, do you think I’d bother to publish all the stupid thoughts I have put down in this book? All these thoughts truly are stupid to me – they’re obvious, they’re banal, they’re things I think all the time – but I have such contempt for you readers that I’m assuming they’re not stupid to you. Think about that. Mull over that. You’re probably too stupid to even understand what I’m saying. You probably think this paragraph has been clever. It has not. If you think otherwise, I loathe you – but, at the same time, I would like you to buy this book, and, to some extent, I want you to adore me. I want to be worshipped, I want to be revered. I want to be godly! But I can only be godly if other people truly are inferior to me. Therein lies the problem.

It’s a problem particularly pressing for writers of a particular kind of onanistic, ostentatious fiction of which this is hopefully not an example.  The truth is that if one is majorly concerned with looking clever to your reader, seeming more intelligent than them, one must believe, at least on some level, that one is more intelligent than one’s reader. (If one doesn’t believe that on any level, one simply is not capable of being concerned with looking clever.) And that arrogance necessarily entails a sort of contempt for the reader.

Hey, look at me, look at me, look what I can do, look at me, I am the greatest… and you, you there in the crowd, you really are thinking this is great aren’t you, you really do think I am the greatest.

Ha! You fucking imbecile.

(When I wrote this, I thought it was an intelligent digression but now I think it’s stupid. My past selves are in general contemptible to me. This dates to a Wallacian phase now long passed.)

What else can we say about my infancy? I suppose I have a few interesting details and a couple of anecdotes. One interesting detail is that we went to Perth when I was three and I remember nothing of this trip. Another is that the Sydney Olympics happened when I was three and I basically remember nothing of them, although I do remember Strawberry Kisses by Nikki Webster very well (but that was probably still being played well after the Olympics because it is such an exquisite piece of music) and I know, due to my parents’ memories, that we did go to a few unimportant soccer matches early in the tournament. Another detail from this period of my life is that I was attacked by a magpie or crow in a park somewhere in the inner-west when I was maybe three or so. If only I could remember this! It might make for some interesting reading. I mean, I sort of feel like I can vaguely remember it, but unfortunately for you I’m too decent and honest a person to pretend that the memory is any sharper than that. Another detail is that we, as a family, continued to head back to Marrickville and its surrounds pretty often, I think, and would go the Greek bakery every time. There the baker would always give me and Miranda a free sweet pastry, which I really liked. I think I might have a memory of this happening when I was also only three or so. Another detail (broadly stated) is the names of the TV shows I would have been watching during this very early period. Some of these would have been The Gogs, The Hooley Dooleys, The Wiggles, The Teletubbies, Postman Pat, Morph Files, Pingu, Batfink, Playschool and Thomas the Tank Engine. There were definitely many others, and I probably watched some of those more than the shows I’ve listed here. Frankly, I don’t even know if I watched The Teletubbies, Thomas the Tank Engine and Playschool a great deal (or even at all), although I do know that they were extremely popular when I was an infant so it seems likely. I briefly mentioned The Gogs before, but I’ll do it again, because the show is rather wonderful. The Gogs was a Claymation series first given wide viewership on the BBC in 1996. It concentrates on the lives of a family of cavepeople, possibly meant to be Neanderthals (given the Neanderthal-like facial structure of the mother and father, with very prominent brow ridges), possibly just Homo Sapiens or very possibly neither (this actually seems quite likely considering the show is quite loose with historical accuracy generally[4]). In any case, as Wikipedia puts it, with an unusual elegance (apart from the tense inconsistency), “The Gogs revolves around a family clan of dumb, primitive and socially inept cavemen in a fantasy prehistoric Stone Age setting, and contained [sic] much dark comedy, various toilet humour-based gags and gross out situations; for example the cavemen losing control of their bodily functions. It also featured [sic] their often comedic daily struggle for survival, and attempts to advance their technology and society, such as creating fire, and often failing miserably, comically and absurdly in the act.” While that summary paints a fairly good picture of what the show is like, I feel that describing this family clan in greater detail will be highly illuminative yet also undetrimental to possible enjoyment and I will thus do that now.

There are six main characters in The Gogs and each has various comic strengths that serve to make the show so great. Perhaps the most prominent is the mother figure. She is a strong, muscular, domineering, rage-filled, violent, rather ursine black-haired matriarch, and is basically the leader of the family, constantly having to compensate for the physical and intellectual incompetence of the men around her (in fact, as far as hunting prowess goes, she is more of a man than they are). She wears a leopard-print tunic, a tooth necklace and fur slippers. Her husband (or husband-like figure) is a smaller, similarly black-haired man who, despite a reasonably athletic physique and a big manly, hispid head, is utterly cowed by his wife and, while a proficient hunter, possesses skills that are repeatedly shown to pale in comparison to hers. He wears light brown rags, and a similar tooth necklace and pair of fur slippers. Their eldest son is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, extremely dopey young man (or possibly teenager) who is also utterly cowed by the matriarch and an even more hopeless hunter. He often tries to impress his family in various ways and always fails. He dresses in almost identical clothes to his father but he is much smaller. Their only daughter is a very solitary, taciturn, pacifistic teenage girl with a very lanky body and a tiny head covered in flocculent, brown eye-covering hair who (despite her miniature skull) shows signs of incredible scientific genius, for example drawing on a rock, in the first episode, Einstein's famous equation E=mc² as well as miraculously prescient blueprints of a car, a plane and a helicopter. Unfortunately for her, her physical weakness and strangeness ensures she is victimised by the rest of the family, or left behind when the family is fleeing from danger, and her attempts to make technological advances for her family are always thwarted by filial violence. She wears very similar clothes to her mother, although they look very different on her radically different body. The youngest offspring is a baby boy with an ovoid, glabrous head, big blue eyes, a single, very sharp tooth and overactive orifices: a big spherical nose out of which streams a constant flow of sticky, green snot, and a bottom that farts frequently and produces implausibly massive poos. He tends to cry a lot (as in the first episode when his family simply can’t get him to shut up), manages to get himself involved in a lot of daring adventures (as in the episode when he is transported along the ground by a mole), and, fortunately (for him), succeeds often, with his switch-on-able sweetness and cuteness, in bringing out the powerful maternal loving and protective instincts in his otherwise fierce and violent mother. Finally, the old man of the family is a gruff, grumpy, ill-tempered, hot-headed, crude, senile character who has the most wonderful appearance: a long, lanky body, topped by a head with a bald crown which nevertheless hosts a pair of bushy white eyebrows, a bushy, white handlebar moustache and a white beard so long and flowing that it performs the function of clothes, almost always obscuring his crotch area no matter how much he exerts himself (and he does exert himself a lot, showing few signs of physical deterioration). This character almost always carries a big wooden club with him, of which he makes frequent use to bash people’s heads so hard they disappear into their bodies.

The reason I know all this – with only minimal assistance from Google Images to increase the precision of my physical descriptions, and a bit of help from Wikipedia to jog my memory about the nature of the characters – is that I have watched all the episodes available on Youtube twice within the past year, and, more importantly, used to watch the show a hell of a lot before the age of six. Truth be told, I’m not sure I really liked it that much as a kid. In fact, I think I might have even found it a little terrifying. After all, it was set in a rather bleak environment – a kind of ugly brown and green landscape full of mortal danger and various bodily excretions – and all the characters were, at various times, either perpetrators or victims of rather extreme violence. Plus, as Wikipedia has just informed me, the show was not even really designed for infants and eventually got released with a PG classification. Nevertheless, I do remember my dad liking it when he watched it (and my dad had a huge influence on what I decided I liked), and the main reason I do know that I watched a fair bit of it is that when, on a whim, I decided to go on Youtube and type The Gogs into the searchbar about a year ago and subsequently clicked on Episode 1, I recognised everything about the show straight away. Indeed, even as I continued to watch more and more episodes, I was still finding that almost every scene brought on a pang of ancient recognition. I even knew the plots of certain episodes just from their beginnings. I found this rather amazing.

I exhort you to watch it. If you do, though, don’t just watch it illegally on Youtube like me; instead, pay the money like my parents once did when they bought the VCR version which, I believe, is still sitting somewhere in the garage, having been unplayed for many years. Intellectual property rights are important. People deserve remuneration for things they make, particularly if they’re brilliant like The Gogs.

There are also three other TV shows on that list that bear further elaboration for various reasons.[5]

Actually, I typed that sentence above a couple of months ago, but I hereby renounce it. We have reached a cross-roads. It is at this point that I realise that my ambition of creating a truly thorough documentary account of my life can never be realised. All I will say is that The Morph Files and Pingu were, and indeed are, terrific shows that I highly recommend. Also, that Batfink was a show that my sister and I both watched quite a lot, I think, and that I remember very distinctly a quote from it (that was probably repeated hundreds of times): “Your bullets cannot harm me – my wings are like a shield of steel”.

Now seems a good time to move onto an account of the babysitter/nanny who looked after us children for a number of years, from when I was probably two or three to when I was six or seven. Her name was Kirsty and she was probably the most awful person I’ve had to deal with in my life. Unfortunately, I don’t remember a whole lot about her apart from that. I’ll do my best to recall, though. Here is a stream of facts.

She was probably in her early 20s, she lived in South Turramurra with her mum (and possibly her dad) in a house that was likely quite small but had a sizeable pool out the back, she almost always had a very stern expression on her face, she was not affectionate, and, finally, upon reaching a certain age, I classified her as a Class A Bogan (“a certain age” being long after I last saw her, by the way).

As I suggested, all the facts point towards Kirsty being a rather ghastly person, although I did not have the experience, the finely tuned misanthropic judgement skills, the authority or the vocabulary to ever think of her as such when she was actually my nanny. Instead, at that time, I think I may have thought of her as “mean” but mainly just looked upon being with her with an intense dread, and not just because that entailed not being with my parents, whom, at that age, I still cleft to with animalistic fervour. It really was just awful for me, being in her company, more than for Miranda. I think this sibling disparity was mainly because, as far as I can remember, every time we went to her goddamn house, I was sent straight to bed in what I think was a greyish room, in a big bed, and wasn’t even allowed to whisper quietly to myself. Indeed, every time I did start whispering to myself, at a volume which I thought was very quiet (something I did, you should know, because I was imagining stories in my head and wanted to speak in various people’s voices – like maybe one voice might have been the voice of some soldier and another might have been the voice of a monster (this is really only hazy in my mind, although I think I do recall that they were usually quite vivid scenarios involving death)) she would storm into the room with what I remember to be a very angry, sour expression, and command me to stop talking and go to sleep. It’s quite odd, this memory, because I do definitely have the impression that this was an incredibly routine occurrence, and that she’d often have to come in multiple times per afternoon as I’d still continue to whisper to myself in what I thought were ever quieter, almost imperceptible voices – although they clearly weren’t. The funny thing is, though, that at the time I remember being almost baffled as to how she could hear me, because I truly did think I was whispering at a volume no human could possibly hear from another room. I think I might have leapt to some supernatural or paranoid conclusion that she was some sort of Disney-movie witch or otherwise non-descript fiend who had eyes everywhere, or could just somehow hear me because of some power, no matter how quiet my voice.  Either way, her constant suppression of my enjoyment and horrible castigation meant I really did fucking hate going to Kirsty’s house. It was rather traumatic.

Despite how long I spent in her thrall (and I think it was a traumatically long time), I have surprisingly few memories of being with her. I suppose I have very few memories of my childhood in general, but it’s a useful literary device to create such an apparent “paradox” (in the loose sense of that word) because I can use it as a basis for a witty comment about how I must have “repressed the trauma”. Unfortunately, I’ve just eliminated that possibility by being so self-conscious. Anyway, one little illustrative quirk that I do (seem to) remember is that Kirsty always equipped herself with those weirdly bleached-white, fake fingernails that a lot of women used to have a few years ago. I used to find those just a little bit creepy as a child, and, to be honest, still do. I also remember that we went to the Macquarie Centre quite a lot. The Macquarie Centre’s a large, popular and fully fitted-out mall (which even has a very well-used ice-skating rink) in the middle of a bleak, barren industrial complex in the godforsaken “suburb” of Sydney known as Macquarie Park. I used to hate going there. I have this one strong memory of trailing behind her, desolation filling my soul, as she marched through the horrible, porcelain-white, faux-palatial wasteland towards further whiteness, the eternal nothing. I don’t precisely remember a specific source of dread, but I know that it was real as any dread or horror or sadness I feel today. It does seem that she was truly a horrible woman. I have little doubt that she was the worst kind of person to occupy the job of baby-sitter, because it seems clear that she didn’t possess a maternal instinct or magnanimous spirit. If she found me cute, I certainly don’t remember her showing it. As I recall it, she only ever seemed to evince sneering contempt towards me, and spoke always with disdain. Not the right way to treat a child.

I think my mum always used to comfort and console me when I spoke of the horror of being with Kirsty, but my parents still employed her for a long time. When they finally disengaged her, I think my mum felt bad for putting me through such torment – certainly whenever I brought up the subject she used to say sorry. But it was too late… I am damaged.

You know what I haven’t mentioned yet about my early infancy? Toys. They were, unsurprisingly, a very important part of my life when I was a young infant. I had figurines, lego, toy replicas of larger objects, a remote-control car – the works. My favourite toy at probably around the age of 4 was Action Man. I don’t really know who the fuck Action Man was (as in what his fictional identity was), although I know he wasn’t from a movie, like an Indiana Jones doll or a Harry Potter figure or whatever. You can look him up on Wikipedia if you want. All I remember is that he was a tanned, ripped dude with a wrench in his belt (I think), and probably a proper weapon of some kind, and that I often pitted him against various other more nefarious figurines I had at my disposal, which probably included plastic animals and other homunculi and so forth. You know the idea. Perhaps this began when I was a bit older, but I know that at some point I paired Action Man with the blue remote-control open-topped jeep I had, enabling him to go on daring missions to save the planet against the baddies and so on. Again, this was probably when I was a bit older, but I remember that (at some point) I used to have a lot of fun using that remote-control car to transport peanuts to my dad. Transporting peanuts to one’s dad might sound vaguely slavish, but the fact that I could put the peanuts on the two car seats and transport them remotely made it tremendous fun.[6]

We always had a fairly significant lego set, but oddly enough I don’t remember really playing lego at home. Perhaps part of the reason for this is that I was never really the engineering type and lacked the attention span or creativity to make building intricate structures with lego interesting. In any case, that’s all that can be said about my toy habits as an early infant. There will be occasion for mentioning toys again, however, so if you happen to be a toy fetishist leafing through this book for descriptions of toy use, do not despair. In fact, I’ve got a terrific story to tell about toys. Get your toys out.  

A number of months ago, I had the privilege of rewatching footage of myself at the age of four that I had not seen for many years. We still have the video that I saw (and then saw again and tried to reproduce in literary form) on the family computer downstairs. Basically, it is a video entirely filmed by my dad of the family visiting this place called “The Animal Kindy Farm”, one of those zoos catering to kids where you get to feed the animals. I don’t know where it is – somewhere on the western outskirts of Sydney, I think – but my parents tell me that we visited that place a week or so after 9/11 took place, after going to a Lebanese restaurant, in order (according to my mum) to show solidarity with the Muslim community.[7] It’s a very moving video for me, and I really enjoy watching it. In the video, “I” (whatever that means (and in fact I’ll discuss what that means soon)) am a boisterous, rambunctious, talkative and ebullient little boy with a bowl of hair white as snow. My parents are basically recognisable, and my sister is a lot more quiet and undemonstrative than me. We all seem to be pretty happy as we walk around the farm, past the various pens, particularly me. I call llamas “baby elephants” and do other tremendously cute things like that, and make lots of delightful noises and seem quite clever for a four year old. A great watch.

I had actually seen this video many times since it was first recorded, but until that day a few months ago when I rediscovered it on the Mac downstairs (where my dad had only recently uploaded it, I think), there had, as aforementioned, been a long hiatus. Thus, suddenly seeing real video footage of “me” at such a young age again was really affecting. I was so moved by it, in fact, that either that day or a few days later I started trying to turn it into a short story in the third-person that I could add to my autobiography, which (the autobiography) I had provisionally, half-ironically titled “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”. Here is that incomplete short story, mostly written in the third-person dramatic monologue that is characteristic of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

“When he was four and still in pre-school he and his family took a car trip out to the Animal Kindy Farm. When they arrived and his dad parked the car, he pushed open the car door and climbed out into the bright sunlight. Behind him and around him, his sister and his parents were getting out too. His dad walked round to the boot and retrieved his video camera, while his mother and sister started to talk.

The ground below him was dusty and there were little tufts of grass here and there. Above, there were cars next to each other, in lots of different shapes and colours. Around them and around the place were gum trees with the droopy green leaves which were familiar. To his left – through a great wire fence – was the Animal Kindy Farm, and he could already see some camels in the distance. It was all so big and exciting.    

He turned around and noticed his dad had turned on the camera and that it was now pointing it at him. His dad spoke to him: “Where are we?”

He replied, loudly, hoarsely: “At the Animal Kindy Farm!” He needed to impress the camera: he started running around from side to side; he spoke again: “At the Animal Kindy Farm, we’re at the Animal Kindy Farm.”

His dad started walking towards his mum and sister with the camera. Tom turned around.

His mum spoke while pointing to a tree right near them: “Bluegum.”

His sister nodded. Then she spoke, exuberantly: “Let’s see if I can see a camel – oh, there’s a camel!”

He was a bit annoyed coz he could have said the same thing but he hadn’t and now his sister had got the attention of mum. He was excited though. He started running around and then jumped in the dirt a bit.

His mum spoke again: “A bluegum farm.” Then she looked at him: “That’s a good way to dirty your pants.”

He heard but didn’t reply because his sister had climbed onto the bonnet of their blue car and was lying flat on it and he really needed to join in. He climbed and wriggled on top of the bonnet and now he and his sister were lying together, side by side; it was warm. His dad pointed the video camera towards them as they lay there.

His mum spoke to him and his sister: “It’s warm, is it?”

He nodded and so did his sister.

His dad spoke: “Will we go inside the farm, children?”

“Yeah” he said, then his sister too. He wanted to hear his voice some more so he said “Yeah” again, this time extending it into a slow drawl. As he hopped off the bonnet he emitted another hoarse noise: “Woooerh.”

“Badly scripted by Aitken films” his dad said. Then Tom saw his dad pressed the red button on the camera which stopped it recording.

After his dad and mum had talked to the person at the counter and asked for tickets and the paper bags full of fodder which smelt funny and that he and his sister could use to handfeed the animals, and after his mum and dad had paid for them, they entered the Animal Kindy Farm. Inside it, they were walking along a wide tiled pavement next to pens full of hand-feedable animals. The very first one pen, on the right, was the goat pen. He saw his dad started recording again when they arrived at it.

“Give him some food, Miranda” his dad said.

“Ok” she said softly.

He had to be heard. “I’m gonna see what sort of food – ”

His sister spoke, while holding the paper bag full of the fodder: “Do you have to put your hand in it?”

He had to be heard. After putting his hand in the fodder bag and feeling its unusual texture, he decided to shout: “Aw yuck!”

He was now kinda nervous about feeding the goats coz they had big teeth and they were sorta scary-looking. But he watched as his sister walked forward confidently, with a hand full of fodder-cylinders, towards one of the white goats, and he watched as she slowly but precisely put her hand in front of its mouth, and he watched as it licked the feed off her hand and she screamed slightly out of shock, and he watched as she turned around towards mum and dad and started laughing. He needed to do it himself. He walked up to the goat next to the one she had fed and thrust his fodder-filled hand in front of its face. It too licked his hand, and he too made a noise out of shock then began laughing, louder than his sister had.

His mum, enjoying her offsprings’ laughter greatly, began to laugh herself.

He needed to be heard. He shouted: “Ewwhyarck!”

His sister had grabbed more fodder from her bag and was now feeding another goat. She laughed again as it licked her hand.

He did the same but did not laugh, instead making the noise “Zaararahehe!” Then he said, loudly, “This is very animal ‘cept on land.” That didn’t make much sense.

As his sister was putting her arm out to feed another goat, his mum said to her: “Don’t – keep – make sure your hand’s out straight.”

His sister followed his mum’s advice and fed the goat – this time without making any noise.

He was looking in his fodder bag. He suddenly saw something interesting and needed to be heard. He shouted: “Hey, it’s got all different stuff in it!”

His dad, who was still videoing, just said “Yeah.” Then he said “Do you wanna go see something – ?

He was excited. “I wanna go an see something else, I wanna feed some more from my packet.”

His sister spoke: “Can we come back to the goat? – coz it’s really cute.”

“Yeah” he said and his mum said it as well. 

He still wanted to feed one last goat before they moved on though. He put his hand out in front of the two goats that were eagerly poking their heads through the fence. He noticed that he had already fed one of them. The one he had fed forced its head ahead of the other one; he jerked his hand back. “I want the other one.” He put his hand out again. As the wrong goat thrust its head towards it again, he jerked it back. “No” he said, imperiously. It happened again. “No.” … “No.” He finally got the right one and was satisfied.

He saw that his mum and his sister had already begun walking towards the next pen, which was full of big tall black furry animals. His dad was still filming him though, and they walked together over towards the black furry animal pen. As they approached, he still couldn’t work out what sort of animals they were but decided to say, as a hopeful guess, “He’s a baby elephant!”

His dad replied to him, in his pedagogical voice: “They don’t look like baby elephants, Tom.”

He wondered what they were… he suddenly got it: “No, they’re baby giraffes.”

His dad looked like he found that amusing. He wasn’t sure why. He had probably got it right. “You gonna feed one?” his dad asked again.

“No, this” he said, as he approached one of the black baby giraffes with food in his hand. When he put food in its mouth it licked his hand really vigorously: “Awokk! It’s realleh soft.”

“Try it again, Tom, I didn’t see that one” his dad said.

As he outstretched his arm towards one of the black baby giraffes again, his mum, who had been talking to his sister, said “Tom, you gotta open your hand out.”

He did and then, as the black baby giraffe started eating the fodder, he felt it nip his fingers slightly. “Hey!” he exclaimed while rapidly retracting his hand from the black baby giraffe’s mouth. “Don’t eat my fingers!” he said, imperiously.

Just after this, the donkeys, who were in the pen adjacent to the black baby giraffe pen, began grunting and eeyore-ing loudly.

“Even sounds like you, Tom," his dad said. 

His sister, who had been feeding some black baby giraffes of her own, heard this and laughed. 

Tom enjoyed being talked and laughed about. He wanted to make them laugh more so he emitted another inhuman noise: “Ohwehoh!”

“Come and say hello to them” his dad said.

He heard this but stood staring at the black baby giraffes. 

“Come on.”

He began to walk with his dad towards the donkeys, and as he approached them decided to comply with his dad’s request by shouting “Hallooolihhh!” at the pen. 

“Come and say hello” his dad said to his sister. Tom turned around towards them and saw his sister was approaching from behind, with his mum.

As his sister approached one of the donkeys she said “What does that one feel like?”

His dad replied: “Well, we’ll soon find that out.””

There ends the story. I was not particularly proud of it. In particular, I thought the dialogue was poorly rendered (to be specific, there are too many “X said”s coming before the actual spoken words) and I was not entirely sure whether I should attempt to use my four year old idiolect consistently throughout the story (as I would have to in order to pull off the third-person dramatic monologue style).

One other anecdote needs to be aired before I graduate to memories of primary school. It occurred when I was three, I think, so I possibly should have included it earlier, but (bizarrely) it didn't cross my mind.

It all started when the rents announced their intention to take us to Yum Cha. That context tells me it was most likely a Sunday (not that that matters very much). Soon after revealing the plan, I think my mum suggested to my sister that she put on her yellow dress. But my sister was very reluctant. At that age, she wasn't particularly keen on dresses, so this wasn't very surprising. What's important is the opportunity I saw in this gender failure -- a chance to claw ahead in the parental-gratification stakes. As Miranda complained and remonstrated with my mum, I boldly entered the fray, pronouncing that I would like to wear a dress myself. I was declaring to my mum that I was happy to fill the void left by a failed sister. I knew that such a daring and outlandish stance would attract attention. And so it did.

But it wasn't all good attention. It will come as no surprise that my mum was not that eager to authorise my preference -- at least in the beginning. Indeed, despite the logic  of the situation -- the fact that she should have been glad thatsomeone was willing to make use of the abundance of children's dresses in our house -- she did start off rather reserved. So much so, in fact, that once she established I was serious, she tentatively attempted to undermine my preference, even proposing to me that I wouldn't really like wearing a dress, and would probably regret it. Nevertheless, I stood firm. I was very insistent, and I was very determined. I did countenance the possibility that I would regret it, but I decided it was better to just be consistent and brave any approaching storms with the stoicism of a man (in a dress).

In any case, the doubts that I was experiencing faded into insignificance when I considered that my declaration had actually drawn all the attention away from Miranda. Soon after I announced my desire to wear the dress, my dad had been recruited in the deliberations, and my mum was (I think) in the throes of deep, philosophical concentration, presumably engaging her feminist conscience in some fashion. So I had succeeded in one regard, even before a decision had been made on whether I would be allowed to go to a restaurant in a dress. And in the end, I was allowed to go to Yum Cha in a dress.
Once I got there, though, I don't think I enjoyed it that much. I think it just made me a little nervous, more than anything. I also know I never wore a dress in public again (however, there is a picture of me wearing a pink tutu on the verandah).

So now we're done with my infancy. 

---

[1] Yes, as far as I recall it, I wasn’t even aware that we were learning a mysterious language called “French” when we were doing these exercises. I seem to have somehow missed that memo.

[2] Which means it’s meant to look feline rather than ranine.

[3] This is obviously using my current, 18 year-old language. I really don’t know what words I would have assigned to the parents’ concern with hygiene at the time, but I feel that the ones I did use captured my general feeling at the time. That said, I was probably not nearly mean and bitter enough to use words with the connotations that stupid and anal have.

The impossibility of truly documenting my past has been highlighted again. It is a ghastly spectre that haunts me constantly.

[4] Indeed, one episode depicts the germination of the idea behind Stonehenge, while in various episodes the antagonists are dinosaurs (including one particularly enjoyable episode in which the men are chased around by a velociraptor) and in another the family sleeps inside the skeleton of a woolly mammoth. If you know anything about prehistory at all, these details will immediately strike you as totally incongruent.

[5] I’m sorry if it seems a little weird reading a novel where this bloke is just talking about his favourite TV shows as an infant, but you’re reading it you fuckhead. 

[6] Note: not an endorsement of slavery.

[7] Who, at that time, were apparently copping a lot of flak and racist slander and so forth.