My townhouse is a small eighties box at the end of a row of identical boxes in the dankest corner of suburban Ourimbah. Its backyard is a steep slope of unstable mountainside thick with scrub, stunted gumtrees and insects that hum like distant traffic for most of the year. Though the sun never penetrates the damp three-by-five-metre paved courtyard, the skeleton of an arbour leans heavily over the small space, held up by the privet-lined wooden fence of an annoying neighbour and the twisting, clinging ropes of wisteria and Madeira vine that slowly devour it. Lantana encroaches from two sides, adding colour to the otherwise endless green void. The courtyard is cold, dark and never dries out. Moss and mould are at home here. And so am I.

Inside, the heavy drill curtains are drawn, to dissuade another annoying neighbour from popping in and because the driveway gets sun. The faint glow of it sneaking around the edges of the curtains is already too much to tolerate.

I have to stop drinking. This is not an epiphany, more a daily mantra when I wake sometime between eleven and one. It means I miss breakfast, often lunch. Dinner might be JD or scrounged with whatever change I have in my pocket; a street kebab, a hotdog. My body is constantly on that verge between thin and too skinny, my skin is pale against the black hair I occasionally hack off without too much skill. The fact that my sister calls the effect ‘fragile’ makes me laugh. There’s nothing fragile about who I am. What I am is deliberate. But, God, I have to stop drinking…

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