A man came into my life then. He was already in it, but it’s around the time of the first memory I have of him. It isn’t my memory. It is the memory I have, which is his, but I have it. This is the first I’ve spoken about it - which is more than he ever did. Even if he wanted to, he didn’t have the words. Tata was a man of few. He was one of the men who, angry at the way their life has gone, but unaware of any other way, choose to violently assault not the random stranger they will never see again, but the person who cares about them the most, because that is who is responsible for life not having gone the right way. He was never responsible. Mama couldn’t be. She died and the twins did too. I was responsible. For everything. It was always me. That he let me know, walking us to the church, the moment he came into my life.

Hanna sees the brown mark on my skirt and tells me to come over with a belt and a cloth. When I have them, I stand in front of her and she grabs my arm. She lifts my clothes up. ‘Be quiet,’ she says, pulling the cloth up between my legs and wrapping the belt around it. ‘Finished.’

Keeping it in place, I walk slowly to my blankets. Monika barges in. ‘What are you doing?’ she asks. I tell her to go away. She jumps up and down and keeps asking.

Tata stood behind me and showed me how to hold the axe. I swung fine, but once the axe was in the wood, I couldn’t lift it. ‘You can,’ he said. ‘You are not weak. Your brother is weak. But you are not. You are strong. You take responsibility for your actions. That is what you have to do, always. Take responsibility.’ He took the axe and pulled it out. ‘Your brother needs you to be strong. Your mother. She is not strong, but you, you…’ Tata’s hands were shaking. ‘I make you strong.’

I remember all that, holding this box. I know he’ll see this photo.

Monkeys don’t want us to go to class either. They want more food. Monika was silly for giving them anything, but even she didn’t think we’d all have to do marches just because she broke the rules.

When we return to class I know that no one in class is focusing. Everyone looks at Monika when the teacher turns to the blackboard. Cristina is in front of me, and every few seconds she turns around to look. I do not. I stop myself. I pay attention. I listen. Elephant. Fish. Snake. Scorpion. I close my eyes and see the station in Karachi, and the scorpions that would scamper onto it, and all around me the sleeping bodies that looked like bags.

They drive our mail down this road. Tata works at the post office with a Greek and a Hindu. He gets money for it. ‘I must speak English,’ Tata says. ‘Are you learning? You must learn. We must learn what they speak.’

It is late. The bugs are loud. We walk back to camp and I read on my bed, lamp under the net.

When Tata gets home, he goes crazy. Lifts the lamp over his shoulders and backs away. ‘One of these nights,’ he spits, ‘you will burn the tent and everyone inside it because of your stupid reading at night. Read in the daytime. The night is for sleeping. Things are what they are.’

British soldiers gave us dresses to wear for our birthdays. Monika and me, our birthdays on the same day. Close to Easter this year.

Monika reminds me of Mama. I sit beside her and remember Mama at the last Easter we had, dropping the onion peels into the boiling water and slipping the eggs in with a spoon. When the eggs were done she’d put them on a plate and we’d sit at the table. Mama would show me how to scratch the tiny lines in the shell but I couldn’t do it like her. She asked why Tata was hitting me. ‘I didn’t read my book properly,’ I said.

Monika and I read together and I wear my dress whenever she is wearing hers.

The trucks are slow over the ice.

Two hundred miles from the station to where we are going. That’s what they’re saying. We do not know where we are going. I look around the truck and spot a loose flap of canvas. I can reach it. Pull it, roll it up then straighten it out again. Move it this way and that. For another hundred miles.

She smacks the wall with her knuckles and nearly topples forward. I sit the cripple up. ‘You know,’ she sputters into my ear, hot and oily, ‘that you are lucky to be with me, here? What do you do? Put cow shit in buckets, and get grains, and just walk around, doing nothing? Do what I am telling you to do or I will kick you out and you’ll freeze before you come back in.’

I do not know how she will kick us without any legs.

Someone comes out of the trees. I put my hands over my forehead and squint to see who. Mama. It is Mama, standing there. I see her, there in the fire. I can see her.

My toes are in the mud. I cough. Clench the gold necklace. Beat my chest. It feels like I am choking.

‘We were jumping off the jetty.’ Tomasz rests the side of his finger on my chin. ‘You slipped and hit your head. I swam over and pulled you here and, then, I don’t know, you just woke up. You just woke up.’

I close my eyes, listening to the water. I feel his hands on my shoulders. He checks himself, and me, for leeches.

Porridge is stuck to the windows. Thick, gluey peels.

I follow the nurse. She knows Polish and English. Other nurses are with her. We walk up stairs and stop at a door. The nurse calls my name. ‘This is your room doll,’ she says. ‘Two weeks on the day shift, then a week off, then two weeks on the night shift, then a week off. And so on. The shift is twelve hours. Break is one hour. Alright.’ She rolls her eyes and lifts the gold chain around my neck with her thumb. ‘You do not wear this. You will be choked.’

Little boys pick cicada shells off the trees.

I walk past timber posts and iron sheets and see another bus coming in, from Kelso. Ciocia and Wucjiu will be on this one. I know that they will be on it.

The bus stops in front of the building. Workers are standing around. I approach but do not get too close. I do not want any of them to see me. I do not want to answer any of their questions. I just want to see Ciocia and Wucjiu. I look for their faces.

‘Did you take one?’ Monika lifts the yellow heart off her lap. ‘They gave them out. Mangoes.’

I sit up. She cuts the mango on one side and then on the other, leaving a wide slice in the middle. ‘You can’t eat that. There is a big seed and it is hard to cut.’ She scores a grid pops out cubes of bright orange flesh. ‘Did they show you how to do that?’ I answer her in English. She pokes her tongue out. ‘Eat it,’ she orders, ‘it is sweet.’

Like pure sugar. I take the knife and try to cut the middle piece. The seed is strange and woody, and I cannot cut through it, but I cannot see it. In my head Tata is taking an axe.

Tea cut short by Lily kicking the walls. Other patients start to wake up. Torches flicker. One of the nurses is hunched over with her hands across her stomach. Another nurse runs down the corridor. Three others grab Lily and try to keep her legs down. I help. ‘I know my name. My name is Lily. I know my name. My name is Lily,’ she repeats, over and over as she wraps her arms around me. More nurses come. We force her onto the ground. She breathes loudly through her nose but her mouth is shut. Her body throws itself, up and down. More come and her arm is jabbed with a needle, and jabbed again. In a moment she is still. I look at her shoulder, at a brown mark forming under her garment. Blood. I clench my fists and look up, seeing my face in the glass on the broken door, dark, lit, then dark again. ‘She needs surgical spirits.’

Over the sink I bite into a mango and wipe my mouth with my forearms. No time to wash my hands. Rushing through the corridor, I wipe my hands on my dress. They are sticky from the mango. I feel sticky under the arm too. I squeeze my arms like I’m wringing out the sweat.

We’re serving. I lift a bowl off the tray and reach over Gwen, placing it in front of her. I do the same for the next patient, and the next. I come to Lily. She smiles. My English is good but this morning a smile and food is all she wants. Until she whispers.

I turn. ‘What did you say?’

‘Unclean hands!’ She jumps and suddenly I cannot see, and a bowl hits the table and my face melts, and I dig my fingers into molten porridge concrete.

On the way here I saw a group of men beating someone up. ‘Can’t you see where you are going?’ they yelled, bottles smashing, ‘dumb Syrian, are you blind? Dapto dog!’

I watched him do nothing. I wanted him to fight back, I wanted to turn around and go in the other direction but I did not do any of those things. I stood, frozen, and watched. When the men saw me they got up and cleared out. I turn my head. No one from the pub came out. No one nearby. Just this man, on the ground. I went over to him, sat with him.

Then I came here.

The cold blasts through the wood into my nostrils, sharpening my hairs: I am a porcupine, closed and small, like those drawings on the wall in our classroom in Uganda. There were drawings of elephants and zebras and lions but we never saw the real ones. I wish I could have seen more of them. Not monkeys in the trees and on arms laughing at you, but stampedes on the plain. I wish I could have seen them running. I wish I could have found somewhere high up and very far away from where they were, so I could see their whole bodies, and see them all, and where they are going. I wish I could have seen that. Just once, in all the years that I was there.

The trees are different here. And the storms are nothing like Africa.

The Madonna doesn’t blink. I don’t want to carry her but I know Tata wants me at the front.

‘Słoneczko, słoneczko! Look!’

A moth is on Tata’s finger and everything that was important is gone. His other hand is in the air, fingers stretched and not moving, and between them, his cigarette. He stares at the moth open-mouthed, and there are lines in his forehead, like he is seeing something that he has never seen before. The moth flies off. Tata laughs. I look at him, puff my cigarette, and laugh too. ‘What’s funny?’

Tata wipes his eyes with the back of his finger and shakes his head. ‘It just wanted to say hello, but it said nothing.’

On the radio they say it’s unseasonably hot.

Getting off the tram there’s wetness under my arms and down my back and behind my ears. There’s time to relax before I see them but I do not want to sit. I walk, away from the station, to Grace Bros. On the air, and on my skin, I smell and feel the thickness coming from the brewery, coming out of the bricks. It wouldn’t bother the girls but it bothers me. The smell of alcohol and no one drinking it.

Andrew heard that there were Europeans coming to Sydney and he wanted some of the culture, and he got Cristina, and she got a man who listened. He got cucumbers and sour cream and black bread, and she got lamb chops. None of that is on these tables.

I get up and put my arms around Franciszek. Tata grumbles - I can hear the vibrations down his suit, onto his hand, across the table, and up Franciszek’s collar. ‘Polish peopl in Australia,’ Franciszek says, waving his finger, ‘are not like Polish people in Poland.’

Andrew laughs and beats the table with a fist. He tries to coax Tata into drinking beer but Tata won’t touch the stuff.

Holding Tata, holding him close so that I feel his side through my dress, I remember the white buckle shoes and my sister behind me, holding my hand. I remember the camera flash.

Through the door I see the aisle, and further, all of them. Cristina and Monika moving away, and across the street people are sitting on cars and fences, watching.

‘We go?’ asks Tata, looking into the church.

I nod and as we go, he places his walking stick against the door and leaves it there. His arm tenses.

Outside for a cigarette. What are we doing? We sit and feel the itch of the bites after the mosquitos have gone. I feel it around my ankles. I feel like scratching it. I remove my heels and hold them over my feet, and the itching is like mites. I’ll stamp them, crush them. Voices under my skin.

We go back inside and dance again, and all the thoughts and feelings go away. He’s doing what I want him to do, and I’m who he wants me to be. The music is good and he knows how to lead, but I put his hand there, and it’s me who stops and sits back down. He follows.

I love him. I married him without knowing it.

We name everything in their pantry and fridge. The raspberry jam, the bowl of ricotta, the eggs, the butter cucumber, the tomato. Paprika, dill, onions. Cans. Faster and faster. We make a mess. Leave it. No one cares. We sit. God knows what we’re talking about. I’m not really there. I want objects that are simple, that I can talk about.

He knows there are things that I’m not telling him. It’s hard to tell but I think he likes it. Here he does, anyway. When there’s a nice record on.

We joke about me being a knight with my gold armour and hair helmet and smile sword. That’s his joke. I like it. He means to say nice things, and when he’s saying nothing, he’s very serious.

I had the most awful dream last night. It was back at Gladesville. When Lily died and they let those nurses go. They left her unattended with the water running and when they came back, she was in the tub, lying there, not moving or making a sound, except for the steam. Hot water running. They lifted her out of the water but her skin didn’t come with her.

In my dream I was the skin. Like a snake, like what it sheds. And I tried to slither away but all I could do was make these crinkling sounds like chip packets. That wasn’t me who left the hot water running. That was them.

The first page of a 2016 feature-length screenplay I developed in the years after my grandmother’s passing.

Her childhood in rural Poland; survival of Siberian exile during WWII; relocation to Australia as a poor refugee; and her inability to emotionally connect; it was all the result of her psychologically and physically abusive father.

In Cane Cutter, I take this background and apply it to a fiction: an elderly migrant discovers that her estranged father is still alive and travels hundreds of kilometres to find and confront him.

Screenplay available on request.