Between us, over the years, Tara and I had assembled some rudimentary family knowledge. Our mother grew up poor in rural Victoria, the youngest of three sisters, hoping for many years that she would be a saint like Joan of Arc. Once, when she was nine, an angel came and stood in her bedroom, huge and androgynous. Her parents were bitter, obedient Catholics. Her father worked in the canning factory, though he dreamt of being a farmer one day, living on a Catholic commune somewhere even bleaker than where they already lived. But her mother didn’t want to do that, understandably, and it never happened. My mother survived, is what she felt, I think. She got away. She went to university, and lived in a series of big communal houses, and met people who were interested in politics and music. She became a mystery to her parents, it seemed, an aberration. And then they died, in quick succession, before she had even finished her undergraduate degree. She was not close with her sisters — politically they had nothing in common — and apart from a few dismal Christmases together as small children — long, strange, sun-blasted days in rural Victoria — Tara and I hardly ever saw our cousins. I don’t know how other people feel about their own family history, but it always felt to us, I think, as if something was missing.

Our mother wanted to be a singer like Joni Mitchell, who she faintly resembled, when she met our father at a full-moon party in 1978, at his house, in Byron Street, in Elwood. That’s how the story goes. A full moon in Taurus. The house belonged to our father then. Soon it would belong to our mother too, and then to me and Tara, in that order. Now it’s simply a façade that belongs to someone else. The rest is gone. The rest is just jutting glass and concrete. I cannot stand the music of Joni Mitchell. She annoys the shit out of me.

It’s that house that convinces me we did, in fact, have a childhood, and in dreams I’m often still there. Or I can close my eyes and run my hand along the long hallway walls. I know the cracks off by heart, the bits of thick paint, the gouges in the plaster where something or other happened. I don’t remember what happened, but I remember where. Or sometimes I do remember what happened, and then I’d rather not. This is where my father threw a plate, a glass, a whatever. This is where he smashed that thing I loved. This is where he kicked the door off my bedroom, or threw the television against the bookcase.

He liked throwing things.