He cleared his throat and drank a gulp of wine and then he read Mother’s sonnet, spelling out the first letter of the first word of every line, making sure no one could fail to understand.

It was 1970.

Germaine Greer had yet to publish The Female Eunuch.

Mother wasn’t a respectable woman.

PART 1 FOOD IS A SOLID FACT

MILK

In the beginning, I thought my mother was a book. A paperback, with a cream and orange jacket, and a picture of a small milk-bottle-shaped bird. The book just happened to have a mass of golden, wavy hair. It ate packets and packets of chocolate digestive biscuits. It regularly heaved and shifted and made low rumbling sounds, and sometimes sharp high barks.

But I was happy: I was getting all the milk I needed, I wasn’t cold, I wasn’t hungry.

Sunlight came through my eyelids. The book had a comforting heartbeat. Its pages turned with a papery whoosh, whoosh.

And then Mother yawned and the book fell from her face.

I broke off from the breast and wailed. Mother was not a book at all and she was enormous. Her colours weren’t orange and cream and black; they were pink and gold and grey. She had a big mouth and small, sharp teeth. Her face contained nothing that was familiar, nothing I could get a purchase on. She was utterly, utterly strange.

And I never got used to her strangeness. Mother never settled into a reliable shape. She’s always been unfathomable: woods I can’t see on account of all the trees.

You won’t believe any of this, Ornella. You don’t think it’s possible to recall things from such an early age. But it pays for the brain to be forgetful, or maybe we wouldn’t recover from the trauma of being born.

And I remember that too: being born is unbearable. It’s terrifying, the worst thing that ever happens to us. The weight, the terrible squeezing weight, and then, just when you think you can’t take it anymore, the sudden paralysing weightlessness. The massiveness of space and air. And the cold, it’s so cold!

Better to be a marsupial, born into a pouch, always able to climb back into a warm pocket of fur. Humans just get spat out into cold white nothingness and can’t ever go back.

But you’ve never imagined being a marsupial, Ornella. You’ve never imagined inhabiting anything except your own brain and body, plain and simple. Your first memory, you say, is of your mother yanking a pair of tights over your nappy, propelling you across the floor on your backside. From then, there is nothing in your memory banks until a Grade Three skipping contest. Before you knew it, you were an adult. In between, I imagine lots of grey bitumen, greaseproof paper and orange peel.