My life as a young Australian novelist.(Reprint)

THREE STORIES

IT'S HIGH SUMMER; I'm fourteen, walking home from school. Sweat is pouring down my face and I almost miss it. There's a furniture truck parked in the street outside my house. My first thought: oh shit, he's done it again.

When the family lived up north, Dad's standard operating procedure was put the stuff on tick, then move before the debt collectors arrive. My siblings went to a jumble of schools as Dad dodged the tallyman around Far North Queensland. One brother had eleven schools in two years.

This got harder once we shifted to Logan City, a sprawling outer-suburban development outside Brisbane. We'd see the furniture truck then--the collectors were starting to wise up, maybe by keeping better records. We'd be minus a telly, washing machine, stereo and bedroom furniture for a month or two; then Dad would start the process over again. After one particularly keen lot turned up in a white pantech with the words COLLECTION AGENCY painted on the sides, kids at school started saying my old man was a "bum" and a "jailbird".

IT'S THE END of Year Two, and I've failed to learn anything. Every time I write my name, it's spelt differently. I spend my time at the back of the class manufacturing spitballs. I'm the archetypal holy terror, the kid who gives teachers blood pressure problems and makes them leave the profession. I'm an expert at both the funny (chewing gum on seats) and the macabre (massive stick insects hidden in the teacher's desk drawers). On my report card, one young woman--first year out of teachers' training college, equal parts terrified and fascinated by her proletarian charges--writes, "this child will never amount to anything".

Some time later, I learn I'm dyslexic, and Mum waits tables and cleans rich people's houses to pay for one-on-one phonics tuition and occupational therapy. To this day, I've never really figured out how it worked, but it unlocked whatever was locked between my ears. I can still remember the eerie sensation of going from the bottom to the top of the class inside six months. Flowers for Algernon scared the bejesus out of me; I was worried the process might be reversible.

I'M IN MY SECOND year of law school, and Suri Ratnapala, the eccentric genius who teaches us Constitutional Law A, sets Polyukhovich v Commonwealth as our case study. Are you trying to set me up? I ask him after class. No, he says mildly. I'm trying to teach you that in this profession, thinking is actually a good thing.