Mug Shots by Barry Oakley

of nature but a gift.

    All done the old-fashioned way: first the wedding, then the baby (Madeleine).
    The gift cried a lot at night, and every morning I’d emerge from our flat as if dazed by a dart and walk to Caulfield Technical College, to which I’d mercifully been transferred. Though the students were more manageable, teaching was just as trying as at Richmond. It was hard to be enthusiastic about punctuation in front of a class of forty after a run of sleepless nights.
    Madeleine was soon getting teeth and I was losing them. The trouble went as far back as the war, when our father, who was in charge of Air Force stores on Thursday Island, sent us back a huge tin of quarter-pound blocks of chocolate. First we used them to build ships and castles, then we began eating them. After this, and a daily diet of lemon tarts in my school lunch, my teeth gradually succumbed, and I was forced to go to a dentist.
    â€˜They’ll have to come out I’m afraid,’ he said, as he inspected the stumps and stalactites of my upper jaw. A few days later, in a surgery opposite Caulfield Railway Station, a mask was put over my face, and I was told to inhale. It was nitrous oxide, laughing gas, and I had an Experience. I was ballooned to Somewhere Else, where the ace of diamonds had inexplicably to be presented to gain admittance to a behind-the-mirrorland quite different from the field of dreams. Things happen in dreams, but this was suspended in timelessness. I was floating in an eternal now, and this, it was immediately evident, was what the afterlife was going to be like. Time and space will fall away, leaving just you, treading presentness as one does water. You don’t expect intimations from your dentist, but this has stayed with me ever since.

Nightmare of the red room
    Despite her now having an indentured husband, Carmel was pregnant again, and we moved from the Caulfield flat to a characterless house in Carnegie, a characterless suburb. The price ($6500) was all we could afford. ‘Stylish’ was how the estate agent puzzlingly described it, and stylish was what Carmel did her best to make it become.
    Some things needed doing in its progress towards this ­condition, and I couldn’t do them. I was the kind of man who thought grout was the name of an Australian wicketkeeper, a bastard file a public service expletive, nogging something done with eggs, and sarking a Scottish folk dance. When the fuses went, we had to wait in the dark for my father to come, as he did when the pilot light went out under the hot-water tank.
    Determined not to give up, I got up a ladder once to unscrew a curtain rod bracket. The screw had been painted over, and was immovable. At that moment one of Carmel’s sisters and her husband arrived from Queensland. Alex, huge-handed and practicality incarnate, got up on the ladder, poked with the screwdriver and loosened the screw in what seemed one continuous movement. Alex was the kind of man who spent hours in his shed playing with tenon saws, mitre boxes and diaphragm valves.
    When our second, Justin, arrived, he was brought into a house held together with Blu-Tack. He was a crier too, but we had three bedrooms now, so he could be consigned to the far end of the house. The bedrooms soon filled with a third and a fourth. On the arrival of the fifth, the lounge was taken over, which left us with only the kitchen and living room. By the time the quintet was put to bed with their bottles, books, teddies, dolls and blankets, this room was a wall-to-wall litter of toys. Every night we shoved them into cupboards, and every day they came back again. It was a pointless but essential ritual, a brief respite from detritus as relentless as lava.
    We bought a Guernica print to put over the fireplace, and sometimes, on wet days, when the five were at play, war or both, Picasso’s images of chaos and uproar reflected what was happening at floor level. The contrast between day and night