Olive

My first memory of Caringbah is this, me standing on the verandah, leaning on the white metal balustrade of our new house, looking over into the neighbour's garden. And Olive calls out to me, "Hello Sticky Beak!"

I had no idea what a sticky beak was, and I didn't know that Olive was Olive, she was a seemingly ancient, wrinkly and skinny lady, standing down the hill, hands on hips, looking up at me. I looked around, I wasn't sure how to respond to "Sticky Beak!". What did that mean? I didn't have a beak, and I wasn't sticky, I was just looking.

Later on Olive would take care of me some mornings. My mother says now that it was to do with her "not coping with you, while your brother was a baby". I remember Olive looking after me in the morning but it may well have been afternoons as well. I'd watch Olive as she combed the sheepskin rugs, thick and white and fluffy. As she combed them out I'd play with her earrings, on her dressing table, little screws at the back, holding them up to my ears in her mirror until she told me to put them down. I'd stand behind her, very careful as she dusted swiftly, the room with the soda siphons, a red one, a bulbous blue one, and one plain glass with a chain mail cover. I wasn't allowed to touch the siphons. We didn't stay in that room. We'd sit eventually in the room near the kitchen, a laminex table and a jar of pickled oysters. Olive would smoke and offer me jokingly the oysters. I'd sit on my chair, a vinyl seat and a metal back, and wonder when I could go home. Or ask to see the siphons again.

Olive had two grown up children, Les and Caroline, at least they seemed grown up. I don't know if they were still at school, they still lived at home. Their bedrooms were down a short flight of stairs from the room with the siphons and the kitchen. The house was like two lines, one butted up against the other. The house was white painted wood. The bedrooms ran back in a line from the short flight of stairs, Caroline's room was first, then Olive and Mr Irving's, then Les'. Another step of steps went up into the back yard, there was a space between their house and our shared fence, we had a shade house and they had an aviary, beyond all that was unexplored space.

Their front yard seemed very, very long. There was a path and a flower bed, or shrub bed, between our house and their house. On the other side was a lawn and a driveway. I remember standing, unusually, at the beginning of Olive's path, near the road, overhearing a story. Les had gone away, a friend of his had come over, had said something, had tricked Olive, had stolen things. The grief was that this was a friend of Les'.

In the end Les died, and his girlfriend died, and their children went to live with Caroline, who ended up being someone who went to the Philipines to work for the World Bank. Unlikely but, what I remember as, true.