‘Everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people’

We are in the laundry of Nanna’s council flat in West Yorkshire. My brother, age four, suggests that I, age three, climb into the spin tub of Nanna’s new twin-tub washing machine. Does he provide a stool? I can’t remember. The stainless-steel tub is smooth, studded with holes. Perhaps I thought it was a space rocket? I crouch down obligingly so my brother can close the plastic lid. I hear the laundry door slide shut on its runner, then, further off, down the hallway, the door to the lounge room opens, releasing a blast of wet, maniacal laughter – a man pretending to be a duck. The laughter mutes when the door closes again. Time passes. I am snug in the silver barrel of the washing machine. My brother is sitting on the couch in the lounge room watching cartoons.

Adventures with the vegetable compartment of the refrigerator, an empty fish tank, the pantry, an old suitcase, follow. I don’t need much encouragement. I am small. My brother is dedicated to these experiments with volume, and I am willing and grateful to be his subject.

When he starts school and loses all interest in me, I continue the work alone. The art cupboard at kindergarten. The coat locker at primary school. A birthday party spent secreted in a rabbit hutch, taking heady sniffs of the urine-soaked straw. The laundry press in our first Australian house was already inhabited by a family of geckos, but compromises were made, we got along. Much of high school was evaded by pretending to catch the bus at the end of the street and then walking to the local tip where I sat on a stool in a broken-down horse float and read magazines.

My first proper job, as a park ranger in Central Australia, came with accommodation. The chief ranger apologised as he showed me the single-axle caravan that would be my home. I knew to hide my delight. The charm of the miniature sink, its plug on a chain, the plastic buttons that released the cupboard drawers, the tea-towel curtains that covered the tiny, wind-out windows. My Giacometti postcards looked like posters above the narrow berth.

Years later I read a biography of Alberto Giacometti. When he was five, his family moved to the mountain village of Stampa in an Italian-speaking canton of Switzerland. His artist father showed him a boulder in a meadow on the outskirts of the town. Under the boulder was a cave, just big enough for a small child to stand in. For two years the cave was Alberto’s most important place on, or in, earth. He recalled the experience of being in the cave as a time when he “… attained the height of joy. All my desires were fulfilled.”

In another memory from the same period, Giacometti recalls his attempts to dig himself a hole in the snow, where he could spend the whole winter snuggly enclosed. He was fascinated with geography and, in particular, Siberia. He desired to be in Siberia, but viewing it from a circular hut he called an “isab”, where he could look out from warmth on the expanses.

The impulse for enclosure, for solace in refuge, for being pleasingly surrounded and hemmed in, continues in my life. I identify it in the fiction of the secretive Western Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley. In one of her short stories a cleaning woman hides herself in the cupboard of a family home for a week. I gave it to a character in my first novel, Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living. An emotionally repressed soil scientist turned wheat farmer builds a tiny bunkroom that he drags behind a tractor around the paddocks of his Wimmera farm. He tells his passionate young wife it is practical, when clearly it is not.

This is where I need to explain myself, to make meaning from my behaviour. I could say something earnest about solitude, about the relief that introverts feel when they are alone. Perhaps about the twin impulse of writers to both conceal and reveal.

I know that when I take myself away to an enclosed space I am absent from the lives of others, but somehow more present to myself. And that in small spaces my dreams and secrets feel close to me. The stab of recognition in this sentence from Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog”: “And through some strange, perhaps accidental conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people.”

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