And a drawing? People bought drawings and framed them and put them up on their walls. They didn’t cost as much as paintings to buy, and they weren’t as big, but they were still worth money. I knew this from the success of Papa’s gallery. Charcoal drawings and ink drawings and drawings made with pencil. Mr Parish said drawing was the rigour behind art. Artists usually made drawings to test out what they were going to paint in their paintings, he explained. But he also said drawings were by nature ‘ephemeral’.

Rosa liked the word ephemera. Was it Italian in origin? Latin? No, she said, its roots were Greek. ‘Ephemera.’ Rosa said it dramatically. But the word itself was all vapour. It didn’t really have any drama. It was like smoke after a magician’s trick.

Hearts got broken. Meals got eaten. Paper burnt. I got angry with my drawings and ripped them up and threw them away. Ephemera.

In painting, said Rosa, if you didn’t like what you painted, you could repaint the whole thing white again and start from scratch. But the mistake would still be there, I thought, under the white paint, like colours on the walls of a house if you start chipping away.

One day, Mrs Parish made me a rubber out of bread-dough. I had made a mistake in a picture I was drawing with grey-lead pencil. The drawing was too good to throw out, but I couldn’t find a rubber. She was making Mr Parish’s bread—a kind of bread that went hard over the course of a day but was soft and malleable at the beginning. ‘Here Owen, try this,’ she said. She gave me a ball of dough about the size of a mouse. She was right. It rubbed my bad lines out very well. Only the shadow of a shadow! I thought I would tell Papa this. I thought Papa would be interested that bread-dough could rub out pencil lines. But when I did tell him, he said, ‘I don’t make bread dough, Owen. I make pasta dough.’

In school they started us onto grey-lead pencil in Grade 5. That’s because the teachers know you can make a mistake with grey-lead pencil and rub it out, when you’re learning. Grey-lead pencil is like L-plates for writing because you can make a mistake and rub it out and fix it. That’s why, more and more, I chose to make my drawings in pen or texta. Because I couldn’t rub them out. I had to be certain about a line before I put it down, before I committed to it. Because this was more dangerous.

At school, when we were in the junior classes, we drew horizontal rainbows of colour with our crayons and went over the top with black, deep and thick, until our fingers were encrusted with soft black crayon muck. It was laborious. It made a mess. Then, with the pointy end of a paint-brush, we engraved coloured pictures through the black overlay. Magical coloured pictures, like slivers of heaven through a thundercloud.