It comes over like a dream, but at times I believe it could be a memory, of when I was six. Dad’s mum was old even then, she died in 1980, and I know that at the time of this dream or memory she was being shunted around like King Lear from my father to his sister, neither of them wanted her. Her name was Elsie. She had a shock of frizzy, light brown hair, maybe it was dyed. I didn’t like her much. My other nana, Nana Kimmy – named because she had a dog called Kimmy – was the one with the biscuits and the cuddles.

Dad’s mum complained. She was named after her cat, Shandy. Shandy bit hard, often, and with glee. Nana Shandy didn’t get on with Mum, hated her cooking, said Mum was lazy. I now know Mum can’t cook anything but trifle, so maybe the old woman was onto something. She bullied Dad, too, as did Dad’s sister. When I was a teenager, Mum told me how she once had to tell Aunty Susan to shut her face once when she was getting stuck into Dad, telling him how useless he was at everything. Our family emigrated when I was eight and I’ve always thought in part it was so Dad could get away from the Black Hole of misery Nana Shandy and Aunty Susan represented for him, working like a tag team of nasty Mexican wrestlers to make him feel like he was always going to lose.

The reason this recurring dream interests me is because it marks the first time I took an active part in the human drama. In the dream I make a conscious decision to ‘do something’ about a situation the adults couldn’t resolve, add my six-year-old weight to the mix to see what I can achieve. When I run into the loungeroom, it feels like I’m mounting a stage for the first time. I’m no longer in the audience with the rest of the children.

When my performance starts (in my dream), I’m lying in bed listening to a fight downstairs. Nana Shandy has been staying with us for a while and complaining about a lot of things. Sometimes in the dream, and I know this is real, just before I go to bed we’ve been making bundles of shoelaces. Nana taught me and my sister to weave shoelaces around a tiny wooden frame with four pins in it. She’s particular about how they should be wound as she only has so many labels and she gets angry when a label’s wasted. After the shoelaces, black, plastic tipped, are turned into a neat bow, the label is tucked underneath, folder up and over and licked like a stamp on its sticky underside before being pressed down. Nana Shandy is doing this to make extra money, Mum says. That’s why she gets angry when we waste a label. Nana’s anger is real anger, not the pretend anger adults are supposed to use with kids. The threat of her financial ruin, as she puts it, makes it harder for my little fingers to get it right. Mangled labels are balled up small as possible and tucked under the couch cushions.

When the fighting starts, I lie in bed for as long as I can bear it. I feel despair, helplessness, anger, terror. It’s the first adult fight I’ve heard and it goes on and on, Mum crying and calling on my silent father for support, Nana Shandy getting stuck into Mum and Dad about the bad food, her living arrangements (in the dream she sleeps on the couch), Dad’s lack of ambition – a recent engineering graduate, he is selling adding machines door to door.

I get out of bed and sit three-quarters of the way down the stairs to listen, just like kids do in films. I’m getting more and more wound up, tight like a cheap, tin toy. It’s Easter and beside me on the stairs is a book, or maybe it’s a pamphlet from church. I’m a good reader. I read beside a picture of the Risen Christ: ‘Easter is a time for happiness and joy’. This pushes me over the edge. I start to sob, then I get hysterical. I have to do something. I can’t stand that Dad, who knows everything, controls everything, drives the car, is being picked on by a woman who traffics in child labour. My universe is flapping wildly like a sheet in a gale. It’s all too much, and that’s when I run in, with the book or pamphlet held high and yell, “Easter is a time for happiness and joy!” I grab any startled set of legs that can’t get out of the way fast enough. This is when the feeling that everything’s out of control fades in the dream, after I’ve made my point. My breathing slows. They agree to stop arguing for my sake, but: “See! See what you’ve done!” The door slams. I wake up.

The thing that makes me think this did not actually happen, that I am really transferring a bad day at the office into a dream scenario to process it as ‘dream work’, as Freud would say, is the banister on the stairs. Everything else in the dream is believable: the orange and brown wallpaper has saucer-sized circles on it, just as it would in that drab period of textile history. The lounge suite is brown, Danish-style, with teak arms and rough textured fabric. The stairs are covered in cheap, cream carpet. But the banister is turquoise. It doesn’t make any sense. Every time I dream, there is the banister in glossy, vivid turquoise and it’s not right. So for decades I’ve filed this ‘incident’ under ‘Nightmares – childhood content, fiction’ and left it at that.

January is Dad’s birthday. He lives interstate, so I call him and he tells me how things are going in the retirement village. He drives the bus to the shopping mall and fixes things for more elderly residents. This year we had a good talk; he seems to be opening up as he gets older. All my life he’s been silent and unwilling to share anything except things like how to clean a carburettor, but now he’s letting down his guard. So this year I decide to ask him stuff about the past. I don’t tell him about the dream, I am casual, like it’s a memory exercise – “Remember when...”. This way, I can probe the dream’s edges without putting it directly under the microscope and scaring him off the topic. Yes, Nana stayed with us. No, he couldn’t remember the shoelaces. She didn’t sleep on the couch, it was a camp bed.

From what he says, I’m struggling nightly with a garden variety nightmare, grounded only loosely in fact. I am confident, so I ask, finally, about the colour of the banister. I put it to him straight, like a handyman's question: he’s remade and remodelled every house we’ve lived in since that one, so he remembers; after all, he painted that banister himself. After a little thought, he says, "It was turquoise." Then he laughs, as if even back then he knew it was an ugly colour. 

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