Blue Dress Hot Mess

I leave half bananas in the fridge and I eat one with breakfast on a wood-decked terrace, drinking almond milk coffee on a day which promises to be 40C. The kookaburras sang all night. My father sends pictures on our Family WhatsApp of a Nativity scene and snow – the Christ child in a manger, the meadows thick with ice. My mother says Nutcrackers look out of place in the sunshine; I agree with her, but sit idly and watch a family on their way to the beach. They are carrying a blue-and-white cooler, parasol, a towelling bag. The next lot wear straw hats and carry surf boards. My banana skin is artfully exposing herself on the slats of the dark-wood table which is crusted with toast crumbs and bird poo. I swirl my dark coffee, and wonder whether to make another. There is a crow in the gum tree. The breeze is a whisper that will become a shout later — a full-on wind which, perhaps, will dilute the 40C day. I feel grounded — toes in sand, itching. I feel ready — dark coffee swirling, yellow ‘nana skins empty, glasses of water and the pale trim of heat which shrouds the horizon behind the turquoise sea. My legs are a little speckled by sunburn. I look like the inner flesh of a peach.

We are penguins on the beach all huddled together: matching skins worn for warmth and swimming fast from danger. We both go to eat the orange skins from our Aperols and laugh. Suck the sweet droplets of fizzy fruit flavoured juice off the sticky pulp. Grown-ups drink Aperol and children eat fruit. We are caught in the in between – the slip stream, the Rip – a place between adulthood and childhood, England and Australia, New Year and Life. It is a place of friendship and learning, feeling each other out slowly, softly like carrying a newborn baby or holding a butterfly by its wings, piecing together sections of a person’s background — their family, their homes, their upbringing and their favourite foods — in order to see them in the vivid, stark relief of standing in front of the picture of their past. It is only ever a skewed view – impacted by my own (the artist’s impressions), by the graffiti-like brush strokes of other people’s opinions (her mother’s occasional despairs, her brother’s ill-timed jibes). But the image, once painted, is very beautiful. A Person’s Life: Incomplete. Full of sea and songs and frozen yoghurt. She is the bare bones of a naked model in a sketchbook. The dust of a charcoal pen. I add lines each day. Today I will colour the sea.

I will remember Australia by Go Blonder shampoo and the stickiness of Factor 50 on my goose-pimpled limbs. It will forever be the promise of pasta for dinner and oysters on the beach; Aperols and pub gigs and Indie music which I sing loudly like a hippie from the 60s (where’s my Volkswagen Beetle van now?). Most of all, it will be that bare-flesh sand-filled rub between my big toe and the thong of my flip-flops. Raw, pink pain. Bubbling, blistering pain which I ignore because it feels in some earthy way very life-affirming. Very real. Very Aus.

The flies are lazy in Australia. They are drugged, doped by sleep and slumber and heat. Sleep-walkers of the air. They stick in the suncream.

It is the kind of day I wake up and feel optimistic.

Excitement is balled like a too-quickly swallowed drink in my throat, and my upper back prickles with heat in a way that feels like ten thousand of my lazy flies have suddenly revived – le révélé – and dance a Riverdance in tap shoes across my stretched plush skin. Grains of sand fill my flip-flops. Everything is blue and yellow and sticky and light. I smell nothing. The senses are all sight — the enormity of the sky and the incongruous modernity of the houses, the 70s mattress topper and the ping-pong table on the patio. There are patches of kangaroo-coloured dry heat on the lawn and the beige-grey screen door knocks gently in the wind (pebbles on the window of a forbidden lover). I relish the taste of my coffee; dark, swirling.

It is the kind of day I wake with optimism. The kind of day I know I will record. It is my father’s Christmas. The Nativity feels very far away.

A Longchamp full of sand (Birkins in the dust). The latter bears no resemblance to reality, but I like the way it sounds. We do suncream in front of the mirror and learn Terry’s lyrics in the floor. Lock, stock and hopscotch. I feel pink.

There is a certain smell in the warm-cool interior of a basement shed belonging, specifically, to grandparents. It is so far from must, so near to dust, so putrid yet soft (we use Eucalyptus oil laundry detergent). I am back in France, back in Heaven. There is an old boogie board propped against the far wall, and a washing machine with a lid instead of a door. (You need to turn the taps on to make the washing machine work; I forget, the first time, and pull out dry clothes which are stained and untidy, but smell sweet. Eucalyptus oil). I see no spiders. It is the cool interior of the tomb, buried beneath the stark heat of a house full of windows. 50 minute wash; Eucalyptus and cotton.

Big bad boy no underwear. Six-pack dads and baseball cap prams. Flip-flops thump thump on the dry street. The tarmac scorches. I still feel pink.