Twenty-odd years ago Simon gave me the name Fin. It was somewhere in the thick of a childhood summer, when I was always running away to the baths on the edge of the surf on the edge of the day. I would slice through the thick water and yell to my brother, ‘Five minutes, five minutes’ as he stood on the edge of the pool and shouted at me to come for tea. And one day walking home he called me ‘you old fin’ as he flicked me with a towel and I ran away, and the name for his fish of a sister was picked up by others and it spread and it stuck. I held it beyond the splintering of my family into adulthood, like a teddy bear from a childhood that’s been kept by a pillow for years. It’s the only thing, besides photographs, that I’ve kept from that time. Oh, and a hole in my ear. When I was nine Simon pierced my earlobe using a needle and a potato and a banana paddlepop to numb the pain. The paddlepop didn’t work. It hurt so much I wouldn’t let him do the other one. I’m not good with pain.

What I don’t tell Simon as I say goodbye from my high Hobart hotel room, is that one of the reasons I’m always running away and not coming back for a very long time is that I can’t be in the same city as my mother for too long. It creates enormous problems. Her standards are too high and I feel like I can never quite please her and it’s all so much easier at a distance. She’s fond of telling me I’ve got a lot of growing up to do. I prefer to do it away from her gaze.

That night I say goodnight to her as she reads English Vogue in the wide hotel bed beside me. We haven’t touched for a long time. I lean across and kiss her, my lips to a cheek that’s soaked in Elizabeth Arden moisturiser. It’s a smell that plunges me back to my childhood. I wonder what Antarctica will smell like. My mother looks surprised at my sudden fierce affection and she asks me why I’m kissing her.

‘I don’t know.’

‘You’re a funny thing,’ she says, serious, contemplating. She holds my chin and looks at my face. I have two pimples on my chin and the beginning of my first wrinkle between my eyebrows. I shouldn’t be getting pimples anymore. I move my face away from her gaze. I feel like a dog being inspected. My mother laughs. ‘I’ve always thought you were a funny thing.’

Tomorrow, the ship sails.

Three: Ship Away

THREE

SHIP AWAY