So, while Mr Parish was having afternoon meetings with editors and men from universities in his turps-smelling study, Mrs Parish was wearing lipstick and going into the city to visit the travel agent. Once she even took the train to Sydney as part of her overseas preparations. She went on a sleeper and she said the bunk was so skinny and close to the ceiling she had to fold herself into it like a dollar note in a wallet. She had travelled to Sydney to meet with Norman Sparnon. He was her hero: she had all his books. He had first noticed her work at the Georges exhibition and it was he who had organised for her to attend masterclasses in Kyoto with Teshigahara Kasumi. Norman Sparnon was impressed by ‘the invisibility of technique’ in her work. I remember these words, because Mrs Parish told them to me over and over again. Sometimes, when she leaned in to an arrangement with her big cutting-scissors, I could imagine her saying ‘invisibility of technique’ as she made snips and extracted superfluous foliage.

‘But I am only an apprentice, Owen,’ she said, ‘and I must be taught by a master. You need other people to help you really achieve anything in this world. To teach you, Owen. To help you. You can’t do it on your own.’

She tried to teach me.

‘The samurai,’ she told me, ‘practised Ikebana for relaxation after battles.’

I liked this idea. I imagined the samurais going swish, swish with their swords and creating a perfect piece of ikenobo while blood dried on their cheekbones. But I wasn’t good at Ikebana. When I put flowers together, they immediately fell apart again. Mrs Parish gave me ‘props’ to use, even though this was against the ikebana law: twine, foam, putty. But I never got the hang of it. I tried a flat dish, I tried a tall vase. My arrangements drooped. I guess I was not Zen enough. Zen meant leaving the past behind you. Mrs Parish explained this to me. ‘It’s more like simply forgetting to remember,’ she said. ‘Or just putting the past and the future aside for a bit. Quite hard to do.’ Snip. Tilting her head to the side. Snip. ‘In the end,’ she said, ‘ikebana is not about flowers, and not about nature, Owen, it’s about you.’

I didn’t really understand that, and yet I did. I was ten. I was still making drawings, but not so much. I had given up writing poems because they hurt my head. I had become a vegetarian.