The original paint is still there, but it has flaked off the walls of the house, and I am terrified that, if the current owners repaint it, they will erase my father, and the paint cans I handed to him.

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They now have chickens in their backyard, as free range as our bantams were caged, but they still scratch the same dirt. It’s only now that I want to join the modern movement for feathery backyard poultry that I realise how ahead of their era my parents actually were.

 

If I snuck down the driveway, my parents would not have even left the premises, and even if the house falls, my parents’ initials remain etched in the carport concrete, dated 1986, and it would be clear for me to read today as an inscription on a Roman grave.

 

I am standing outside the house, like an intruder. The house in question is a worker’s cottage, in West End in Brisbane, a house typical of the suburb. I never knew how old it was, but let’s pretend it was a turn of the century build. My parents came across it in the early 1960s, their first marital home, and left it at the beginning of the property boom in 2000. During their custodianship, they had enclosed the small veranda, repurposing the Victorian wrought iron design – there are at least 100 houses in the suburb with exactly the same Romper-Room-window pattern – to be part of the fence. The hallway of the cottage was gutted like a Halloween pumpkin, creating an open plan that modern designers would’ve taken notes from if they could. My parents showed me the original floor plan once, when they ripped up old carpet, the ghostly outlines of old walls appearing on the timber floorboards. It was a dark house, they said, and I could picture the shadows, the grey, unpainted woods, that my parents banished from the place.

 

Someone else has had this house for the twenty years since I have lived there, and I feel like I could step into it today and still find my parents there, un-aged, my dad still alive. The house is in disrepair – a ramble – and every paint flake, every rusty drainpipe, every uneven rust-coloured paver, all have my parents’ fingerprints on them. The side fence – it’s a corner block – has an overgrown bougainvillea curling down the cyclone fence, with a sure, thick trunk that does not conjure up the twiggy mess that dad planted just before they sold. Above the hot pink vine are the bedroom windows, two, one of which was mine. What would I see if I peered in the barred windows today? Surely there wouldn’t be another only child, preoccupied with her world of books, in a hot-pink-painted room like the inside of a fairy floss machine.

 

Did we repaint the hot pink before I moved? I can’t remember.

 

Or maybe there’s a surly black-dyed-haired teenager, pretending to be cool and playing acoustic guitar while wrapped in an era-appropriate flannelette shirt. She holed herself up in that room an awful lot.

 

How would you enter the house? As I stand here now, the front door itself is open, security door closed across the opening. (All doors and windows had metal bars on them, and apparently we were the only house in the street to have never been broken into. They did no good for my fears of escaping a house fire in the middle of the night). If I opened the front gate, I could guarantee, based on its crumbling state, that its hinges would carry out the same singsong melody announcing a visitor.

 

But there’s the catch. The sound of the front gate being opened announced a stranger; the trick was to know there was a side gate behind the carport, which all friends knew to go to instead. So which gate do I open? Am I a stranger to this house now? I never used the front door, why would I start now?

 

I stay outside, and lurk further.

 

The enclosed veranda was our home for our pet budgies, and later, where I wrote my way through essays in university. It was where I got my knee stuck between the bars of the security door as a toddler – several times; turns out I am not a quick kinaesthetic learner – and wailed to wide-eyed pedestrians until mum fetched the butter to free me. The front steps hold the echoes of my friend and I dancing the moves to the YMCA for the neighbours to learn as we blasted it from our hi-fi system; they hold the melted drops of ice cream from evening Havahart ice creams (dad’s favourite), and the condensation from the bottom of a Strongbow cider bottle that mum let me try while in the younger years of high school.

 

I’m not sure if I’d go up the stairs barefoot though. Prior to repainting the stairs, dad sprinkled a layer of sand on each step to stop them being so slippery. I remember tender feet if I went to check the mailbox without thongs, but would the gritty layer still be there after decades of wear?

 

Perhaps it’s safer to go round the back. It’s easy to see from the side street, but impenetrable at the same time: an urban jungle of banana trees, dusty paths between them scratched by the chickens. At times, this backyard has had an above ground pool, a rock wall and sand pit (what remained when the pool was dismantled) that was scarred by streets designed for model cars, a full-size aviary for dad’s breeding finches (later, after we had to get rid of the bantams due to neighbour complaints, there was a mild attempt to turn it into a club house; dirt-averse pint-size me couldn’t abide by the mulched chicken poo and it was abandoned and dismantled soon after), and a weirdo kid who used to zoom around like she was on a race with, of all things, the washing trolley cart. That same kid perfected her netball shots with a rusty hoop her parents installed, but could never prove her worth at school due to being uncoordinated at every other aspect of the game. Wing Defence was her default position, the one bestowed by coaches on the meekest of players.

 

Through the overgrown trees, I can see the pavers – clay-red once, a faded pink now – and my tailbone recalls the time I thought I’d use the steps to jump off while shooting netball hoops, and my legs gave me incontrovertible evidence that my brain and limbs don’t often speak swiftly to each other, and in the moment of jumping, my legs somehow weren’t there any more, and my tailbone was the first object to meet the pavers. The only time this unadventurous child ever went to the emergency ward, she scared everyone by thinking she was paralysed from the waist down for hours. It was just bruising.

 

Those stairs though. Why did my parents not ever put railings on them? They are tall, eleven in all, reaching a doorway at least three metres off the ground that gazes at the Brisbane western storms. No railings. The current owners haven’t put in railings either. Does this mean they don’t have children, or just a cavalier approach to children’s safety like my parents? The bottom step was a lump of rock, or maybe several rocks or bricks together, I can’t remember and I can’t see through the trees now, and I debated every time I counted the steps whether the bottom step should be counted as one of the eleven.

 

At the top step, magpies would often gather for a feed. Hopping up the steps, and warbling once they reached the top to let us know they were ready. Generations of baby magpies were brought up those steps, screeching and squawking, and then would bring their own babies in the waves of heat of subsequent summers. Have their grandchildren’s grandchildren remained? The back step was where dad honed the core of our relationship together: a love of birds and a keen-eyed watcher of rumbly thunderstorms, where we’d stand at that top step and marvel as our backyard transformed to a sickly pea-soup-green under the thunderclouds. It is no coincidence that the house I will return to today, a fifteen-minute drive from here, faces west for the anticipation of those same Brisbane storms, with a vantage point three metres off the ground. This house, too, has eleven steps to a front deck, and a railing only on one side. I had never counted them before today.

 

No magpies feed at my current home, although one walked in to our kitchen just after we bought it to give us its blessing.

 

Just around the edge of the back door is the bathroom, and to inadvertently heighten my love of storms, dad once pulled out the ceiling of this room. With nothing to insulate the catastrophic and adrenalin-fuelling hammering of the rain on the now-rusted corrugated iron roof, it would make a glorious accompaniment to sitting on that top back step. Once the storms have passed on by, you could probably still rush to the front room and see them marching towards the city skyline. But when you go to sleep, you are unlikely to be accompanied the sound of swishing tyres through rain puddles on the street outside, due to all the traffic-calming speed humps.

 

On the other side of the house opposite the bathroom is the kitchen, and judging by the state of the outside of the house, I suspect the kitchen still remains as a 1950s museum piece, all baby blue cupboards and exquisite joinery, not a soft-close drawer in sight. It was here that six-year-old me realised one night that I hadn’t seen our pet dog all afternoon, and I learned that he had just “gone to sleep” next to my slippery dip in the backyard. It was here that I would share all of the excitement of new knowledge absorbed during my university studies with mum. It was here that I would make myself absent from chores as an adolescent. It was here that I helped mum assemble great bubbling lasagnes; and on a long-distance phone call from New York demanding the recipe where I learned that it was created from the back of the San Remo pasta box.

 

If I enter, the illusion shatters the moment I try to grasp for the ghost of my parents. The house becomes a neglected shell, and I am overwhelmed with anger at the owners for not taking good care of my parents’ things; at the same time I am gaspingly thankful they have not erased their trace.

 

So I don’t.

 

There is a sign out the front today that says please shut the gate. This is not my house any more, nor my parents. I have lived just as long out of the house now as I did for my first twenty years of my life.

 

This is no longer my neighbourhood, either. My West End of the 1980s was of mixed neighbourhoods of grimy hippies, stalwart Greek immigrant families with their front gardens of concrete, and Vietnamese immigrants who seemed to suddenly all open a restaurant, fragrant grocery store, or bread shop. Our Greek neighbours used to bake us sweet biscuits, and every time I eat a melomakarona or kourambiethies now I am transported to being five again. We knew when our Vietnamese neighbours’ son was home because when he reversed his Celica, it would play a song. I can still hum that song. The mum once ran out onto the road screaming one day while I was studying with a friend for a Year 12 Maths exam. She was brandishing a kitchen knife. Another friend was chased down the street by a different neighbour waving a samurai sword.

 

It’s definitely easy for me to scoff at “newcomers” to West End trying to save the culture of the suburb, and sit high up on my pedestal declaring that West End of the 80s and 90s was somehow more “authentic” and gritty. I’m sure the traditional owners of the land of Kurilpa would scoff at my naive idea that somehow a suburb 30 years ago is more authentic than before Europeans came and erected places like Boundary Street in the suburb.

I remember smirking to myself the first time I saw the current owners with the Save West End placard on the front fence, as though I knew they weren’t authentically Westenders. But the West End of today is still a joy. I am here today because of the Davies Park markets. Where were our beautiful, vibrant markets in the 80s and 90s? The Vietnamese bread shop we used to buy our fresh bread for breakfast on Christmas Day is still open on Vulture Street, but now there’s one of the best coffee roasters in Blackstar just around the corner. The Boundary Hotel’s main bar is still as seedy as ever, but the drive through that dad used to buy his carton of XXXX tallies from has been converted into a garden bar. The crazies still live in Russell Street, and the Food For Less I used to work in for five years and its shopping centre was converted into – holy of holies – a shopping centre with air conditioning. I fainted 3 times while working because of that heat. I did so many walks along the river with my best friend in the afternoons after school, harassing the State High rowers, but it’s nicer now. The industrial factories are slowly being converted into more appealing residential zoning; it remains to be seen whether they flood in the next 30-year flood.

 

I ache to touch the house. It is hard to see my parents’ blood and sweat peeling away and rusting, and not cared for, but if the current owners tore down the vines and painted away dad’s horrible choice of gold trim, they’d be clearing away fragments of their lives. Tim Winton was right when he made Cloudstreet a living, breathing, personified house: my old house breathed back my parents to me so effortlessly that it made my lungs overfill and my throat catch.