Your driveway in Coburg was a gentle ascent and drop, buoyed by the good suspension on the EH Holden Papa bought from Les Preston. The Holden did not so much stop as come to a rest. The concrete in your driveway was smooth too, perfect for playing ball or for practising in roller skates. I missed Coburg when it was sold. When you moved into your house in Richmond, Papa had to reverse in and out several times to get the car straight in the narrow driveway and then there was barely any space to open the doors. In Richmond, everything pressed too close to everything else. You couldn’t even roll a ball on the floor. It felt like a ball rolling on the floor might put a dent in something.

Our house in Hawthorn had a driveway made of stubby bricks, and the car made a pit-a-pit-a sound when we turned in to it, as though we’d just got a flat tyre. A ball, once bounced, would ricochet from the bricks into unpredictable places. You could stub your toe if you weren’t wearing shoes.

To and fro and to and fro: I spent a lot of time in the car and I was not sure any night where I was going and where I might wake up. I was confused sometimes when I opened my eyes: if I wanted Mother, you were there; if I wanted you, Mrs Parish was there. Things got cleaned up and changed around between visits, so if I’d put something down I couldn’t expect it to still be there when I came back two days, three days later.

I still use the word home about Hawthorn, the place where Mother was. But other times, when I thought about home, the whole thing made me angry. It made me rip up pictures I was working on because home was a place that kept changing locations. I ripped up my own drawings to spite them, all these adults throwing the word home around like it didn’t matter. I’d rip up something they thought was ‘great’ and ‘fabulous’ just to show them that them that I could do it. Take that! I wanted to say. You like this? Well, I can wreck it!