from A Life, Gathered — Chapter One

There's a table in this caravan barely wide enough for a coffee cup and a notebook, and that's where I am most mornings now, in Koroit, with the kind of quiet I spent forty years too loud to hear. The kettle ticks. A magpie works the gum outside like it's being paid by the note.

I've got my hands flat on the table. I do this sometimes. Look at them.

These are the hands that busked outside Target when I was eleven, case open on the footpath, a kid playing twelve-bar blues to people who mostly wanted me to move so they could get to the tinsel. They taught themselves the guitar the wrong way round at five — solved it backwards before anyone thought to set it up right — because the pull to play turned up years before the proper instrument did. They put a few holes in a police-station wall once. The wall lost. They wrote tens of thousands of lines of code over the years — back-office systems, a string of websites, and in the end a video game I gave away for nothing.

Same hands.

I used to need one of those things to not be true — the busker or the bloke at the wall, the builder or the wreck. Pick one, file the rest under not me, must've been a different fella, anyway. Took me a long time, and a lot of help, to land on the trick: you don't get to pick. They're all me. They all came out of the same set of hands. And sitting here now, hands flat on the wood, I've finally stopped pretending otherwise.

And the making started at my mother's, on the floor, with a kitchen spatula.

There was a stool. And a spatula. I'd kneel at that stool and drum on the seat of it with a spatula out of the kitchen drawer, banging along to the records — I can still name the one, Rocky Burnette, "Tired of Toein' the Line," that rockabilly thing from 1980 that would've been new when I was small. No instrument. No lessons. Nobody teaching me. Just a kid who couldn't not make the rhythm with his hands, using the only tool in reach, on the only surface available, because the pull was already in there and it didn't care what it had to use to get out.

That's the truest picture of me there is. Not a boy handed an instrument. A boy improvising one out of a kitchen and a stool, because the music was already trying to get out of him before anyone gave it anywhere to go.

A Life, Gathered — a memoir. In progress.