We had owned dogs before—blind, deaf and grumpy when I knew them, which wasn’t very well as they were already old and faded quickly—but it had been a couple of years since Jody had finally gone and the house had been pet-free. My mother wasn’t consulted about Mocha; Dad picked her up on impulse from one of our Tolmie neighbours. She was the runt of the litter—smaller than my school shoes at 6 weeks—but that didn’t matter in the city. My brothers complained for awhile that she was annoying, that we didn’t need her, or that she had chewed through their socks and was clearly uncontrollable. But I caught one of them saying a heartfelt goodnight to her late one Saturday. I considered paying him out at the time but thought better of it.

When I started high school, my mother would come upstairs every morning at 6:45am to wake me up. Mocha would bound in after her and lick me on the hand or the face or whichever part of me was closest to the edge of the bed—if she could make it through the mess on my bedroom floor. When I was living in Poland she’d still come upstairs while Mum woke up my brothers, and would run down to the end of the corridor where my bedroom was just to see (Mum used to say) if I had come back in the night and she hadn’t noticed. On her birthday and Christmas day we’d give her toast with Vegemite for breakfast. She loved it so much that on the few occasions when she escaped into the street and refused to come back, all we needed to do was flick the spring on the toaster and she’d be back at our feet within seconds.

She had been getting old for awhile but had only started to show it in the last few years. When I took her for a walk on Christmas Eve (two blocks, that’s all she could manage) I wondered how I would feel when she died. She was 14. We all knew it was inevitable, but it’s hard to know how you’ll react to something until it actually happens. I had been preparing myself for awhile—making sure I said goodbye to her properly every time I left the house in case it was the last time I saw her. I’ve been living out of home for years, but still the thought choked me up, and I realised then how much weight our pets carry in our lives, and how much just knowing she was still around was a source of comfort and support even from the other side of the country.

Mocha always knew damn well when we were going travelling, no matter how much we tried to pretend otherwise, and would race out the front door and jump into the front seat of the car at the first opportunity. She would sit in the car, sometimes for hours, while we packed. ‘You’re not going anywhere without me.’ On Tuesday morning, it was no different. I was headed to Moulamein, my father out bush with our cousins, and Mocha was already sitting up in the back of the Land Cruiser with her tongue hanging out and a giant grin on her face. I didn’t get a chance to give her a goodbye pat—I was running late and too busy wondering if I’d forgotten to pack something myself. That was the last time I saw her, because six hours later, in a beautiful piece of bush called Limestone, my stupid, careless second-cousin drove off without looking and caught her under the front wheel. She was so badly hurt, they shot her. I didn’t find out until Friday afternoon when I turned my phone back on and found voicemail messages from my 23-year-old brother, drunk and distraught and mostly incomprehensible at half past midnight, pleading with me to call him, please, just call him.

You know your childhood is over when your childhood pets die. 2009 ended with a tempest. My childhood ended last Tuesday with a gunshot and a whimper. Part of me feels like we ought to qualify our sadness and anger with ‘It’s just a dog, but…’ but the truth is, it’s never ‘just a dog’. And if the lumps on her chest had turned to cancer and we’d been forced to take her to the vet to have her put down, I probably wouldn’t have felt so angry. We were prepared for something like that and it would have given the whole family some kind of closure, not to mention saving that beautiful, trusting animal such acute stress and trauma. But instead she was killed by someone else’s hard black skidding tyre and a bullet to the brain. It wasn’t the way it should have been—it never is. But she damn well didn’t deserve to have it end like that.

I miss her.

Before that: I found precisely eleven post-it notes in my copy of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Eight of them were blank. The ninth, tenth and eleventh read, in this order:

1. The picture being seen,
2. the feather falling—
3. hiding oneself.

Before that: the silence of snow was unexpected. Surely something that so changes the shape of the world should come crashing in, clamouring, announcing its arrival triumphantly, flamboyantly? Thunderstorms break out the symphony. Thunderstorms are the narcissists, the attention-seekers, the drama students hoping to shock and slander and find notoriety in a quickened heartbeat. Snow is the solitary artist in the basement, meticulous and meditative, painting perfect miniatures. The silence of snow was unexpected and eerie. My skin craved salt in the water and sunlight that would burn and blister.

Before that: my hands smelt like soap and the soap-on-skin smelt like being in the bush when I was twelve, in hand-me-down cargo pants and a black singlet top. It rained most of the night. We walked without torches, hoping the adults wouldn’t catch us. I wore a blue jumper under my coat. We sat on the wobbling wooden bench in the mess tent, listening to the rain on the canvas, and I ended up with a mouthful of your warm tongue.

Before that: I was skinny-legged and daydreamy, too tall for my age, too smart to sit on my hands in class, too shy to know what to say to their faces, holding both hands full of dewy bluebells from under the plum tree in my grandmother’s garden. My Dad nailed planks of wood to the arching branches of the fig tree and I sat among the mosquitoes and turned myself inside out. I wanted fairytales, and never weddings.

Before that: my mother.

Before that: dust.

There is a fast-flowing river, heading for the ocean, and the tributaries are growing. Other people’s faith is both buoyant and a burden. My own faith is caged but still flutters wildly. I’ll do one quick revolution—a somersault, a pause—and smile perhaps, then catch the current again.

Almost every day for a week and a half, I navigated their river. I fished in it. I got mud in my shoes. I saw stars flare and flicker and shoot across the sky. I got scratches on my legs from reeds and rope and the frantic flapping of an ill-fated long tom. In the middle of the night, mullet flew through the air like birds, and all the time the crocodiles lurked.

I couldn’t see them for the first few days. You have to train your eye. It’s not so much that log floating downstream—that’s a cliché designed to throw you off actually looking in the right places. It’s that muddy patch on the bank you need to look at. The slight shadow on the sandbar, or the sunny spot near the fallen tree. Sometimes you can’t tell if it is or it isn’t until you’re close enough to throw a spear, but once the sun goes down, all you need is a spotlight and you can pick the red gleam of their eyes from hundreds of metres away.

I admire them, in a way. I think about them a lot. Every part of them, from the shape of their toes to the back of their throats, is engineered towards expending the least amount of energy for the most gain. They laze around with their mouths open, teeth bared, sun on their backs, waiting for nighttime when the fish fly. And that’s really what they’re interested in—fish, injured animals, easy targets. Despite their reputation, they rarely go after sober, healthy people. Even so, there’s a reason why you keep a shotgun in the boat.

And that’s the thing. Self-preservation sometimes requires that you pull a trigger; that you shoot before you lose a limb. And it’s easy, when you’re fascinated by something, to wait too long, to draw too close, to get stuck on that fucking sandbar in the dark.

My dad always told me not to trust anyone. I do it anyway. I let people take my time without requiring that they prove their worth in advance. I place my heart on the table where people can see it, carve it up and feast on it. I don’t have many secrets. I once claimed I didn’t have any, but I made a meal of that sentence immediately after I’d said it. I don’t like having secrets, and those I do have are mainly other people’s. The only thoughts of my own that I feel like I should need to keep close to my chest are those that are unfinished. Sometimes I think this is what makes me still human; that allows me to still be open to the world and learn from it, because what are the other options? To turn my skin to leather and let my blood run cold? Because that is what a lack of trust means for me. That, and an uncharacteristic silence as all my energy gets sucked into holding down the trigger-happy girl with the machine-gun mouth.

“What’s been going on in your life?” people ask. “Crocodiles,” I answer. The stories have been told so many times now that I wonder if there is anyone left to tell. Perhaps only the crocodiles themselves. Only, I’m not sure they’re inclined to sit and listen just yet.

One particular November, I broke up with a boy in the beach car park at Rickett’s Point. He’d already bought my birthday present but hadn’t had a chance to give it to me, so at the conclusion of my spiel he reached over to the back seat and handed me a small package. It was a notebook: royal purple, covered in hearts, and on the front of it there was a little gold-embossed quote about following your dreams.

It was obviously intended to be a bit special, and when I was eight years old I probably would have loved it, but at eighteen my writer’s quirks were rapidly becoming habits and absolutely everything about this notebook was wrong. It had coloured paper (more like card than paper), wide lines, a designated space at the top of every page for the date and the trite little quote repeated at the bottom. I can’t stand to waste paper – even if it’s horrible – and it took me ages to throw the thing out. I used it for shopping lists and scrap until moving out of home forced me to part with absolutely everything I didn’t need.

We were never a good match. I am a feminist agnostic with a major in Philosophy and English; I write stories about abused girls with illegitimate babies, gay men getting mugged in alleys, drug-taking, sex, loneliness, despair and euphoria – he is married at 24 and studying to be a minister. I heard on the grapevine he writes a Bible name, chapter and verse on the back of his hand before he plays basketball to stop himself getting angry. It always used to rain when I was out with him – every day except for the one we split – and that spring birthed some crazy storms. Sometimes I think the storms were the earth’s way of showing its displeasure. (He would probably say it was God telling him to drop the heathen. It was obviously never meant to be.)

The birthday present, however, stuck in my mind. Perhaps it comes with the territory – being picky about the words you use makes you picky about the surface upon which you place them, because as much as the words themselves are the most important part and don’t judge a book by its cover, quality stationery is all about respect. It was also my final year at school, and at Presentation Night not long afterwards, the principal presented me with a plaque, Stasiland by Anna Funder and a beautiful unruled A5 Moleskine notebook. I would probably have preferred 6mm ruled, but I decided then that my school really had understood what it was all about, just as the former boyfriend so obviously hadn’t.

One afternoon not very long ago, while shopping for books in Brunswick, I had the unexpected foresight to purchase a packet of three pocket-sized Moleskine cahiers. I dithered before buying them – I wondered when I’d get to writing in them. Back in high school, when I believed I was qualified to write what one might (loosely, very loosely) term ‘poetry’, I would swallow notebooks whole; numbering every page, filling them in as short a time as a couple of months, depending on how many free periods and unrequited loves I had. These days I choose my words more carefully. Notebooks are forever only half-full and I have more of them than I could possibly need. But for once my purchases weren’t mere indulgence: one has found a home in the pocket of my satchel and one sits permanently on the bedside table with my alarm clock and a fine blue pen. Too many nights I’ve been wrapped in the lazy haze of almost-sleep when something splutters in the corner of my mind – a spark, a little brighter than the rest – and too many times I’ve thought, “If I repeat this to myself, I’ll remember it in the morning and I won’t have to move right now.” But it doesn’t work like that. I need words on paper or the spark flickers out and the thought slides quietly away.

My crazy MA supervisor once said (although she was probably plagiarising) that if you can harness those moments between awake and asleep – the space between the conscious and the unconscious – that is where the real stories come from. I wonder what I could have found over the years if every time I’d seen that spark I’d climbed out of sleep far enough to blearily scribble half a sentence. For the last few months I’ve tried to get up early and write – to sit in the sun and find inspiration in the patterns of living ‘normally’. But there’s something about the quiet of post-midnight – a solitude you only get when everyone around you is asleep – that really unshackles my mind and gives it space to run.

When I am in love with someone, my writing takes second place. I spend my nights lying awake in a cocoon of tangled limbs instead of the cool blue light of my computer screen or an armchair with a blanket and a pen. It’s okay for a little while but not for the long term. I am not sure how to fix it. Why should writing and love be constantly in opposition? The boys with bad taste in notebooks are easy; not so those who actually matter.

Sometimes I wonder if underneath it all I already know the ending. In Coetzee’s Foe, Susan Barton asks, “Without desire how is it possible to make a story?” On page 9 of my bedside notebook in the loopy scrawl of 3am some weeks ago, it says:

I’m going to be a bag lady one day
with a trolley full of junk.